


Tales From Beta

by BetaQuartz



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Ableism, Ableist Language, Abuse, Backstory, Betrayal, Body Image, Conditioning, Dubious Morality, Ethical Dilemmas, Gen, Homeworld Hierarchy (Steven Universe), Homeworld is Horrible, Identity Issues, Leadership, Loneliness, Mental Anguish, Mental Breakdown, Military Backstory, Minor Character Death, Moral Ambiguity, Moral Dilemmas, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Responsibility, Sisters, Soldiers, Survivor Guilt, Trauma, War, War Crimes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-05-27 20:14:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 40,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15032330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BetaQuartz/pseuds/BetaQuartz
Summary: Halfway through the rebellion, Homeworld scrambled to generate extra soldiers on the ground. The only force keeping Rose Quartz and the Crystal Gems from winning the rebellion and protecting the Earth is Pink Diamond's Earth Quartz Army. The Crystal Gems almost won the war after a raid on the newly created Beta Kindergarten, but were instead driven back by the Facet 9 Kindergarten Quartz That Could. Over the course of five-hundred years, Jasper, Skinny, Carnelian, and the other Betas come to realize who they are and what they mean to Gems on both sides of a war they had nothing to do with.This is a rewrite, canon as of "A Single Pale Rose"





	1. The Inspection

**Author's Note:**

> First, my apologies to everyone who enjoyed my fics before I deleted them. I do have a reason for that, one I'm not really up to having a lengthy discussion over. If there was one you didn't have downloaded that you would be interested in having, you can reach out to me and I could deliver it in a file via Discord. 
> 
> Before I deleted my fics, I was on the fence as to whether or not I wanted to rewrite my big Jasper backstory, "Tales From Beta" after the reveal in "A Single Pale Rose." I've obviously decided to go ahead and give it a shot, because I do find Pink Diamond's actions infinitely more interesting now, especially with regards to her relationship with her Quartz soldiers. Quite a big chunk of this fic will remain the same, but now with the benefit of a year's worth of fresh eyes and opportunities to improve it and help it match up more to canon.
> 
> If you like this, please consider leaving a comment.

The wind howled in the desert, whipping up sand that blew through the hair of every person lined up along the pass in the ravine. Everything at the Kindergarten in Facet 9 still seemed in disarray even as they scrambled to get it organized in preparation for the impeding inspection. After several weeks, Pink Diamond was finally coming to see the Beta Kindergarten for the first time since the Crystal Gem blitzkrieg had caught everyone by surprise and forced the Quartzes there to emerge from their holes in the midst of a war zone. 

 

It was an embarrassment. It was a mess. The Peridots that Homeworld transported in practically threw up their hands in frustration when they were assigned to give the Quartzes their proper designations, only to discover it was next to impossible to approximate their cuts given how haphazardly the injectors had drilled their columns and rows into the uneven, curved canyons. Then they had brought in Agates to try and shape them up for inspection. But by that point in the war, Homeworld was stretched thin as it was, and only five Tumbled Peach Agates could be spared from their ranks in charge of the Prime Army; five Agates in charge of a whole army of Jaspers. It did not take long for them to lose their patience and start berating the Betas for how undisciplined and unprepared they were; as if it was their fault that everything had gone as it had since they were born.

 

Quartzes were made to fight. Quartzes had no other purpose than to serve their Diamond on the battlefield, to lay down their lives if need be for the service of Homeworld. Quartzes should have been able to destroy their enemies from the moment they came out of the Earth’s crust if necessary. So what were the Betas’ excuses for their large casualties, they asked? The lines of orange-and-red faces answered back with nothing but silence and contorted expressions of deep hurt, still reeling from the mayhem of their first struggles. They had no explanations for anything. They still didn’t understand why they had been attacked in the first place.

 

“When your Diamond passes by you, you salute her like this,” said a Tumbled Peach Agate to the group she had been instructed to teach, flipping her cape over her shoulders before flashing a Diamond salute with her arms. This Agate, designated Facet 1A5C Cut-7xE, did not hide the disdain from her features as she looked upon her assigned battalions. She stood slightly shorter than the Jaspers, a gemstone adorning her right arm, and her pink hair was coiled in three tight buns on top of her head giving her the imposing air common her class. It was her job to terrorize these soldiers into a real armed force. They were the last hope that Homeworld had.

 

What a joke, she thought to herself.

 

The Quartzes, lined up, mimicked her sign. Although they copied it correctly, Tumbled Peach could not keep the look of disgust off her face. “I can’t believe we waited so long for backup and _this_ is what we get. I thought Prime produced some questionable Gems, but this place makes you appreciate what actual competent engineering is capable of, because it certainly can’t be found here. Poor Pink Diamond, those amateurish technicians failed her, and we’re now stuck with the likes of you embarrassments.”

 

The Jaspers looked uneasily at each other; Beta was all they had ever known, they had no idea there was anything wrong with it until Homeworld Gems had started coming in more and more from the warp pad and giving their critiques as to the quality - or lack thereof - of their home and the Gems that came from it. Knowing nothing else, did they have any reason to believe their superior officer was wrong? A sense of shame entered many of their cores, hearing her words, burrowing it’s way to nestle alongside the feelings of fear and anger and sadness they had from the aftermath of the raid on their Kindergarten.

 

Tumbled Peach Agate marched up and down the lines, looking the Jaspers up and down with a disapproving frown, remarking about their ugliness, especially the “hideous, off color” ones. Down the queue she went, until she stopped all of a sudden and almost cringed in repulsion as her eyes fell upon a skinny Jasper. Roughly, she grasped Skinny’s arm, engulfing its circumference with her hand completely; there was hardly any muscle to be found on the lanky limb. “Stars, you may be tall but you’re as scrawny as a Pearl. What a sorry excuse for a Quartz soldier.” 

 

Skinny flinched at the cruel words, but remained quiet while Agate let her go and moved on to the next soldier. Looking down at the small Gem in front of her, a scowl spreading over Tumbled Peach’s lips. “Just look at this! Why is there a Carnelian amongst all of these Jaspers? Incompetence, I tell you!”

 

Standing no taller than about half the Jaspers’ heights on either side of her, Carnelian bit her lower lip and muttered, “T-the others were wiped out….” She practically choked on her words as she said them, trying to swallow the fresh memories back down so she didn’t have to think about all of the sisters she had recently lost. Yet her mind couldn’t help but think back to after the raids, to that pile of shards she had dug through to desperately find even one gemstone still intact.

 

“Speak up!” barked the senior instructor. “How can I hear you when you’re mumbling?”

 

Carnelian fidgeted, uncomfortable with all of the attention from the Agate. When she stuttered again over her words, the big Jasper beside her spoke up. “She said they were all wiped out.” Seeing Tumbled Peach Agate turn her attention to her, Jasper clarified, “During the first battles. There weren’t that many to begin with.” Agate kept her penetrating gaze on the Jasper, the only one in the Beta Army to have stood out and made a name for herself during the raid. The Facet 9 Kindergarten Quartz That Could was what the soldiers among the ranks were calling her now. The drill instructor eyed her over, inspecting for an imperfection like she had seen on all the others; all of them were flawed in some manner.

 

Finding no visible defect - but knowing it had to be there, considering this Jasper came from the same dirt as the rest of the garbage Gems around her - Tumbled Peach Agate raised an eyebrow and sneered down at Carnelian again. “And _this_ one survived?” She was unmoved by the painful reaction Carnelian gave to that, like Agate had just struck her hard; obviously the wounds from losing her entire cut were still fresh and sore, but any hopes Carnelian had of finding empathy from her drill sergeant were quickly crushed. “Oh, whatever. You’re _all_ lucky we’re desperate for soldiers at this point.”

 

Stepping passed Carnelian and Jasper, she said, “And when any of you address me, you will respond with proper respect for my authority. I am your Agate, I outrank every single one of you miserable pebbles in this army. Is that understood?”

 

“Yes, Tumbled Peach Agate!” answered all of the Betas, holding their attention. 

 

Tumbled Peach Agate continued to address them, “All of you are expected to protect your Diamond’s Kindergarten, deficient as it is, from falling into the hands of the Crystal Gems. As you have no doubt figured out, Rose Quartz and her rebels are your enemies. They wish nothing more than to rip this Earth colony from the hands of Pink Diamond, and it seems they will stop at nothing to accomplish this; even attacking a fresh Kindergarten, the cowards. We already lost Prime, we cannot afford to lose even Beta now. So you good-for-nothing clumps of sand better start picking up the slack. The Quartzes from the Prime Kindergarten have been doing all of the heavy lifting so far. They even managed to take back the Sky Arena for us just last cycle, despite the number of losses they have taken, but right now the enemy’s eyes are obviously focused on Facet 9. While we continue to drive them out of Facets 2, 3, 5, and 6, you need to keep our ground here. I don’t care if it takes the sacrifice of every single one of you to do it.”

 

The Beta Quartzes affirmed they were all prepared to fight for their Diamond, even though not a single one of them had still ever laid eyes on her. It didn’t matter: she was their creator, their commander, their matriarch; she was their everything, their whole reason for existence. A piece inside each of them knew to whom they belonged. “Remember,” Tumbled Peach Agate said, pacing back and forth again in front of them, hands crossed behind her back, “you were made to fight in this war. This is greater than any individual Gem; your lives do not matter. The highest duty you could hope for is to battle to the death for the glory of your Homeworld.”

 

“Yes, Tumbled Peach Agate!” said the Quartz soldiers.

 

“Agate Cut-7xE!” yelled out a Peridot, running up to the group. “Pink Diamond and Yellow Diamond are prepared to come through the warp pad.”

 

Pink eyes widening in surprise, Tumbled Peach Agate ordered her underlings, “Everyone to formations, immediately!” The Betas scuffled to all get into two long lines along the fronts of the canyon walls on either side of the warp pad. 

 

“At least that got that blowhard to shut up,” mumbled the Jasper with a cleft-like stripe down the right side of her chin, making the quadruplets from Row W next to her snicker under their breaths. 

 

“Do you think Pink Diamond’s gonna be disappointed when she sees us?” Carnelian asked the Jaspers beside her in a whisper. Following Tumbled Peach Agate’s remarks, she was suddenly painfully aware of just how short she was, how much she stood out like a sore thumb. Imperfect. Misshapen. Embarrassing. What if her Diamond hated her? 

 

“Why should she be?” asked Jasper incredulously. “We’ve driven out the Crystal Gems every time they’ve attacked.” She didn’t understand why the Agates were being so rough on them. During the course of fighting off the Crystal Gems, Jasper had expected a different reception from these officers and technicians after they finally reactivated the warp pad and came to the Beta Kindergarten to inspect the troops that had survived the raids. The soldiers had been given the order to hold, and they had accomplished that; Jasper herself had been largely responsible for driving the Crystal Gems out of Facet 9. Didn’t that mean anything?

 

Skinny wiped her sweaty palms on her uniform, trying to mask her own nervousness. “Easy for you to say, Miss Knock-Out-Eighty-the-First-Day.”

 

Jasper’s mouth twitched for a moment, but she then smirked. “You’re just gonna act like you didn’t take down sixteen during the last battle?”

 

“I like to stay humble,” said Skinny with a dry smile. Yet her insides twisted as violently as Carnelian’s, because she, too, now had an acute awareness of just how _wrong_ she was. She’d suspected as such when she’d had time to think about it between the raids. She wasn’t blind. She could see while other Jaspers were muscular and broad-shouldered - especially her mountains sororal twin - she was lean and scrawny. How could her Diamond ever be proud of _her_?

 

A light erupted from the warp pad, pulling the group from their conversations, and an enormous pink palanquin came through it, crawling along on mechanical legs not unlike those on the injectors that still sporadically lined their Kindergarten. It was elegant and warm, decorated on all sides in the shapes of hibiscus flowers. Another even larger palanquin came behind it, just as refined though less pretentious and more technologically-themed than the previous, more cold and spartan in comparison. The two massive transporters settled down in the open area between the two lines of troops. The Peridots and Agates and other Homeworld Gems immediately bowed with a salute, and the Beta Gems followed their examples as they had been taught. 

 

Jasper, Skinny, and Carnelian could not contain their awe when the Gem emerged from behind the curtains of the pink palanquin. She stood taller than her subjects, as befit a matriarch. She wore a cropped shirt with fluffy shoulder-pads and equally puffy pants, adorned by a petaled skirt. White stockings covered her long legs, ending in pink slippers embellished with white pom poms. Her skin was as pink as a cyclamen, and a fully halo of amaranth hair petaled from her regal head. Her magenta eyes were sharper than the stone that shone brightly on her navel. She was the most divinely beautiful Gem Jasper had ever seen, and with but one look she knew she would die for her if she commanded it. 

 

After Pink Diamond stepped forward, Yellow Diamond came out of her palanquin. She stood much taller than even Pink Diamond, dwarfing every Gem in her presence. Hair cropped in the harsh shape of a helmet, she was clad in a yellow overcoat on top of her olive bodysuit, giving her a more militant appearance than the younger Diamond. Her goldenrod gaze immediately swept across their surroundings, examining the Kindergarten and the Quartzes it had produced with a critical eye.

 

Behind their Diamonds followed two Pearls. Clothed in her white, yellow, blue, and pink dress, Pearl kept close behind Pink Diamond, going out of her way to avoid looking at the Quartzes in the two long lines; an odd look of discomfort and guilt seemed to be in those blue eyes of hers, and she clasped her hands in front of her as she followed Pink Diamond in silence. Yellow Pearl, in her lemon-colored leotard with it’s lacy fringe, did the same for her Diamond, although she matched her mistress’s look of distaste for the harsh, sandy environment they found themselves in. 

 

Pink Diamond gave a sweeping, dramatic gesture with her arm as she marched between the lines of Betas. “My dear Quartz soldiers,” she addressed with a strong, warm smile. “How bravely and loyally you have already served your Homeworld in the face of the despicable, cowardly attack on your Kindergarten.” She stepped up to a wan, tawny Jasper, with pale coloring from her elbows up, and laid a hand on her head. “Rest assured, your Diamond has not forgotten you.” 

 

She made her way up the lines, giving a calming pat on the head here and a gentle touch on the shoulder there. Still as shellshocked as they were from their first harsh and unforgiving experiences from war, the Betas were utterly spellbound by her tender caresses and uplifting words. When Jasper felt Pink Diamond’s hand briefly pet her head, she thought she might lose her composure and melt to her knees in humility; it was the first expression of kindness any Gem from Homeworld had shown them, and Jasper had not realized until that moment just how starved she was for gentleness and compassion.

 

“Are you the Jasper who helped save the Kindergarten?” asked Pink Diamond.

 

Jasper was almost at a loss for words, recovering only enough to answer, “Y-Yes, my Diamond.”

 

Pink Diamond’s smile broadened, though a more perceptive Gem might have noted how strained it had become, like she was inwardly disappointed for some reason. But her words only sang praise. “I can ease my worries then, knowing I have such a strong, capable soldier in my army.”

 

Jasper knew then that Pink Diamond would make everything right for them. Despite the trials and tribulations they had already gone through, so young and new, she was certain they were now in good hands. Pink Diamond was going to lead them to a victory against the rebels who had invaded their home and tried to eradicate them. All they had to do was serve her faithfully and capably, and nothing like the raids would ever happen again. All they had to do was trust their Diamond.

 

Their kind, benevolent, perfect Diamond.

 

“And what’s this? A lone Carnelian in Facet 9?” asked Pink Diamond as she patted the little Gem’s head.

 

Carnelian found she was not as uneasy around her matriarch as she had been with Tumbled Peach Agate. She spoke clearly and without stuttering when she said, “All the other Carnelians were shattered during the first battles, my Diamond.” She almost cringed as she said this, like she expected Pink Diamond to react as aggressively as Tumbled Peach Agate had earlier when she told her the same thing.

 

If Carnelian had been aware of it, she might have detected the twinge of regret that dulled the monarch’s eyes for a brief moment before Pink Diamond just smiled and petted her head again. “We can always make more later.”

 

When she next came upon Skinny, Pink Diamond’s features brightened a little in excitement. “Oh, you’re certainly an interesting looking one,” she commented, giving Skinny’s head a pat as well. Simply relieved that her Diamond didn’t hate her for her physique, Skinny didn’t let herself think about how her matriarch’s words did nothing to make her feel any less like a freak. 

 

As the monarch continued her walk down the lines of Jaspers, her co-leader looked along the faces of the canyons and scrutinized the holes that blotted them. The disorder of it all was a strain on Yellow Diamond’s eyes. Pink Diamond’s first colony, the Prime Kindergarten, had been built meticulously, it was almost perfect: even spacing, aligned holes, good base material. The Beta Kindergarten had none of those qualities. The only thing that caught her attention was a conspicuous hole with a strong silhouette, and on closer inspection Yellow Diamond was surprised to see it had what looked like glass friction all the way to the back. For a second, she thought it was a sign of potential, but just as quickly realized that one potentially promising Quartz was not worth the cost of a whole Kindergarten full of defects. So she tucked the piece of knowledge away and followed Pink Diamond until she was finished with her inspection and they made their way to the Beta Kindergarten’s Control Room.

 

“Marvelous, aren’t they?” asked Pink Diamond after the door had shut behind them, sitting down in the throne that had been made for her.

 

Yellow Diamond crossed her arms, clearly unimpressed. “They’re hideous,” she said simply.

 

Pink Diamond forced her smile to widen. Just like Yellow, to only see “defects," and not the potential of any Gem, no matter how different than the average, to be something special. “No Gem who serves me is ugly,” she said, trying to get under Yellow Diamond’s skin.

 

She succeeded in that. “Your standards are too low, Pink,” Yellow Diamond stated pointedly, crossing her arms.

 

“Don’t be so callous, Yellow,” said her sister Gem, leaning her hand against her chin while she crossed her legs. “I’ve told you that treating your subjects with a dash of kindness will make them much happier, and happier Gems are more productive Gems. Aren’t you all about efficiency, behind your stuffiness?”

 

Yellow Diamond hinted at a small smile herself before she hardened her resolve. The time for indulging Pink’s petulancy and irresponsibility had long since passed. She rebutted, “Your unwillingness to keep a more dignified distance between you and your subjects is what caused Rose Quartz to rebel in the first place. You’re too soft.” Yellow Diamond used her discipline to keep herself from yelling at her younger, inexperienced sister, who had furiously demanded her own colony and was now failing miserably to keep it together. Yellow had known all along that Pink hadn’t been ready for the role of leadership she had been born into, and each day in this centuries’ long war kept proving that conclusion to be true.

 

Pink Diamond frowned. Yellow Diamond _would_ try to make such a complicated situation so simple, try to make it so easy to pinpoint exactly what had happened that made this whole situation escalate into a full-blown war. But Yellow knew nothing, certainly not the truth behind the identity of the rebel leader Rose Quartz. Losing all of the warmth she’d had when addressing the Betas, Pink Diamond narrowed her eyes and snapped, “I told you I didn’t even want to make this Kindergarten. I said we should just leave the Earth behind for the Crystal Gems, that it wasn’t worth this trouble. It was you and Blue who made me do it. So if these Quartzes are hideous to you, then you have only yourself to blame.”

 

“I told you not to use red sandstone,” said Yellow Diamond with a sigh, rubbing the bridge of her nose in frustration. “I explicitly told you this planet is chock full of quartz for you to make soldiers with, it was the whole reason we chose Earth for you in the first place, and you chose the one area least suited to make them. Your error in judgment cost you not only many numbers of these defective Quartzes, but also the first of the technicians I loaned you, as well as Blue’s terraformers that were sent here to assist, as well.”

 

As Yellow Diamond continued speaking, Pink Diamond tried to keep her emotions from being read on her face, the remorse, mortification, and shame. She tried not to think about all of the loss of Gem life that had occurred during the raids. She tried not to think of the role she played in the decision of the Crystal Gems to attack the Beta Kindergarten. She tried not to think about that little Carnelian, the only one left of her cut. All she kept repeating to herself over and over in her mind was that she had never wanted to build Beta in the first place. Yellow and Blue had forced her to make it. Forced. She hadn’t had a choice. They weren’t going to agree to leave the planet until she ran out of soldiers to fight with.

 

She had expected the first time she stepped into Beta would be after the bad deed was done and the soldiers were taken out completely, where, as Rose Quartz, she would plant her flag and declare the Crystal Gems the defenders of Earth. Pink Diamond hadn’t counted on her new soldiers actually winning. She had not foreseen that after she had given the technicians the command to throw the injectors anywhere that one would catch lightning in a bottle and produce a super soldier strong enough to gain the upper hand and force her real army out. Things had not gone at all according to her plans.

 

From the corner of her eye, she caught the look on Pearl’s face. She was thinking the same thing, no doubt.

 

Steeling herself into the role expected of her, Pink Diamond pursed her lips and told Yellow, “I’ve got things under control now. There’s no reason for you to stick around.”

 

Yellow Diamond arched an eyebrow at her tone. “Oh yes, clearly you have everything reigned in quite expertly. Five-hundred years of an embarrassing war unlike anything to be found in Homeworld’s history, so incompetently handled that you somehow allowed a mere handful of rebels to outclass your vastly superior army of Amethysts until you had to create this bunch of defects. Clearly your handling of this colony will be the crowning jewel to your leadership. Grow up, Pink. Take responsibility. Take this situation more seriously.”

 

Her words made Pink long to sink into her chair until she could disappear. Yellow Diamond clearly thought so little of her. That was the biggest problem. Yellow and Blue simply did not care about her. They had no faith in her, even from the beginning. That was why everything had gotten so out of hand. It was the reason why she longed more than anything else now to be Rose Quartz fully and forever. She hated everything about this. Pink Diamond was restriction, tyranny, and responsibility. Rose Quartz was change, love, and freedom.

 

“I _am_ taking this seriously!” Pink Diamond retorted snappishly, narrowing her eyes. “Stop lecturing me, Yellow. You and Blue patronize me too much, you always do! You’re the ones who wanted me to keep fighting, well now I have new soldiers. With my Primes and my Betas, I will contain the rebellion and soon everything will be back on course.” She hated the lie even as it left her mouth. Her life had become full of nothing but lies lately. She had lied to her soldiers before and she was lying to Yellow now.

 

“Will you?” asked Yellow Diamond with an icy frown. Whipping around, she ordered, “Pearl, bring up the log report on the list of casualties from the attack on Facet 9.”

 

Yellow Pearl almost started from the sudden demand, but quickly sprung to action with a swift, “Of course, my Diamond!” Brushing past Pearl, who simply stood silent and unassuming by Pink Diamond’s chair, Yellow Pearl pressed her hand on the pedestal in the middle of the room, activating the large screen in front of them. She filtered through the digital files in search of the information requested. Pearl watched as the other servant brought up the file that she herself had compiled earlier; she steeled herself, trying to think of it as nothing but data, forcing herself not to think of what those numbers represented. 

 

“My Diamond, I have found the logs you requested,” declared Yellow Pearl, bringing up on the screen two lists of Gem types, some with cut designations. “Over the course of the raids, the estimated Crystal Gem casualties totaled six-hundred-and-eighteen, with one prisoner of war captured and currently being questioned.”

 

Both Pink Diamond and Pearl fought against their inner feelings that longed to openly mourn for the friends they had lost. They could not help but feel blameworthy of what had happened to them. It was supposed to have been so quick. The soldiers were supposed to be too weak and flawed to put up much of a fight.

 

Unmoved by the shattered remains of rebels, Yellow Diamond crossed her arms behind her back and coldly demanded, “And Homeworld casualties?”

 

Yellow Pearl bit her lip for a moment, but she answered steadily, “Estimated Homeworld casualties: three-thousand-and-forty-two.” Pink Diamond’s plasma blood ran ice cold. The numbers hit her hard. Why should she not mourn for these, too? After all, for as much as she did not want them, those Quartzes were hers. They had been made to serve her, and she had all but given the direct order for the Crystal Gems to eradicate them. This was becoming too much for her. She hated every single moment of this. 

 

Yet, there was that voice from the farthest reaches inside her mind reminding her, isn’t that what she had wanted? Wasn’t that the reason she had sabotaged the Beta Kindergarten in the first place, to ensure the soldiers were weak enough to be taken out if it came down to a fight? And hadn’t she been given no choice when the soldiers started coming out too early and they had run out of time?

 

Didn’t she also have no choice now but to take care of this problem somehow? 

 

Yellow Diamond wrinkled her brow and said with an ominous air, “Collect yourself, Pink, and maybe finally realize the situation you have found yourself in. We’ve lost thousands upon thousands of Gems already. You thought you could handle this, but it has been five-hundred years and the rebels’ numbers do not dwindle while ours diminish continuously! If your soldiers do not contain this rebellion, we will lose this war and the Earth.”

 

If only they could lose the war. If only her fellow Diamonds would finally abandon the Earth, decide it wasn’t worth the Gem life that had been required to hold it for the Homeworld Empire, then everything would be wonderful, perfect even. It was Yellow’s and Blue’s faults. The shards of all of those Gems were on their hands, as little as they valued those. They never listened to her. They didn’t care. She could live with them being disappointed in her, but they didn’t care about her at all, or else they would have just heeded her pleas to leave the Earth alone.

 

Pink knew she was going to have to come up with another plan. Half a millennium fighting them had taught her that her sisters were too committed to their flawed ideals to ever see the value in a colony like this one other than as an incubator for Quartzes. They would never learn to care about the life on the planet. She would have to find another way to end the war. 

 

She briefly considered the possibility of just ending the lie. She could order her Quartzes to stop fighting, and reveal to the Crystal Gems that she was the very tyrant they were fighting to usurp. But her friends would hate her. And ordering her soldiers to surrender was only the illusion of giving them choice. Even worse, it would mean being honest with Yellow Diamond and Blue Diamond, to tell them she had betrayed them. Even with hundreds of thousands of Gems shattered already, she couldn’t gather the courage to do that. She would have to come up with another way. Until she came up with a solution, however, Pink Diamond knew she would have to continue her charade, the double-life she had made for herself as both the leader of the Earth Quartz Army and the leader of the Crystal Gems.

 

She, Pink Diamond, who had thought all she wanted was to be a leader. She, Rose Quartz, who now wished she didn’t have to lead anybody. She didn’t want the responsibility anymore, she didn’t want to be the one making the decisions that were getting Gems killed.

 

How had things gotten so hopelessly complicated?


	2. Practice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a trial-by-fire beginning, things have settled down into a lull at the Beta Kindergarten. The Quartzes have been given instructions by their superiors to practice, but during downtime they find ways to amuse themselves, even in the midst of a war.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who has left kudos and comments. I appreciate them.
> 
> If you like this chapter, please consider leaving a comment.

Their Agate had given them the order to practice, and practice they did, for long stretches of time. Time was something they had plenty of, for the present at least. The instructions they received were vague and largely unhelpful: just get better. Stop being such an embarrassment to the Empire. Didn’t they know how much was riding on them? The Betas were trying, despite the lack of any true leadership being given to them. They certainly weren’t receiving much in the way of encouragement, but they tried. They practiced and practiced and practiced. Any Quartz that was still a novice at summoning her weapon soon was able to master drawing out the tool of destruction from her gemstone. 

 

There wasn’t time for anymore mistakes, the Agates told them. It was the time to realize they had to step forward and show they deserved to bear the emblem of Pink Diamond on their uniforms. She needed them to be courageous. More importantly, she needed them to be competent. She needed them to be stronger, because they were fighting for her colony; they were fighting for her reputation. Nothing else mattered more than that, not even their own existences. No one was more important than Pink Diamond. She was their matriarch, their command, their everything, their whole reason of existence.

 

Beta became thriving as more technicians came in to inspect and fortify the Kindergarten, and for a while it became almost boring in Facet 9 due to the lag in orders. The Quartzes had expected that they would immediately be sent on all sorts of missions, down to the front lines on the battlefields, where every day they would be faced with life-or-death situations. Instead, they were greeted with long stalls. From eavesdropping on the Agates, they were able to gather that Rose Quartz had seemingly pulled back for the time being after the Crystal Gems lost the raids. No doubt Pink Diamond was simply waiting for her next move.

 

Jasper had, perhaps naively, hoped that Pink Diamond would be more of a presence around the Kindergarten, but after her initial inspection, their matriarch had retreated to her base on the Moon to command from there. That was okay. She was too important to be where the major fighting was, anyways. As their benevolent, magnanimous leader, Pink Diamond would lead them from a distance with wisdom, and Jasper itched at the opportunity to prove to her that her new soldiers, especially she herself, would never let her down.

 

In the meantime, all the Betas could do was take their orders from their Agates to practice. The soldiers were divided up by platoon and told to combat each other in order to perfect their skills, because they were horribly lacking in discipline; there just wasn’t the time nor the resources to train this new army as there had been with Prime.

 

Tumbled Peach Agate appointed Jasper the leader of her platoon, which only made sense given she was not only the biggest and strongest of the group, of her whole Facet actually, but also because she had been the one to rally the Betas together during the raids enough to drive the Crystal Gems out. It was indisputable. Other platoons of Jaspers were even envious of the fact that they weren’t part of her group. Jasper herself quickly came to like the idea, even if she hadn’t set out for that position. Leadership gave her a feeling of control that she found sorely wanting ever since she burst out of her hole.

 

She knew she was the best qualified for the role. She had the pride and arrogance necessary to be a leader. She had the raw strength needed to both keep her soldiers in line and also protect them if need be. She was their pillar now. 

 

Her platoon was hundreds strong. They were also the group who took in the sole surviving Carnelian of Beta. Normally Quartzes were divided into units based on their type, but the Agates stuck Carnelian in with the Jaspers, probably because they had no idea what else to do with her, as one Quartz by herself could not be an army - not even the Facet 9 Kindergarten Quartz That Could. They probably assumed she would be shattered soon enough, anyways, being as small as she was.

 

However little the higher-ups cared about her, Carnelian quickly endeared herself to the majority of the Jaspers, who came to love her larger-than-life personality. And for her part, Carnelian latched onto the Jaspers like a second family. She even came up with a variety of individual nicknames for them before she learned their individual cuts. Even by that day, she still had to practice their real names to herself as she looked at all of their faces, trying to remember them.

 

The platoon had bunched around their area of the Kindergarten, forming a semicircle around an open area, where Jasper faced them one-on-one in sparing matches, testing their skills. Individually, they were all hopelessly outmatched against the super soldier, but she kept the matches going. Currently she was busy tossing around a Jasper who had come from the same canyon wall as she and Skinny, designated 8xA but nicknamed Right Eye, due to the placement of her gemstone. Right Eye had missed hitting Jasper with her fist, and quickly had herself gripped in a bear hug before she was plowed into the sand.

 

The other Jaspers found the matches amusing, so long as they weren’t the ones getting pummeled to the ground. “I bet that hurt,” chuckled Jasper 4xG, or Starstripe, with the star-like shaped yellow mark on the left side of her orange face.

 

Beside her, Criss-Cross, named such because of the red stripes forming an x across her right cheek, laughed when Right Eye picked her face off the ground and spat out a mouthful of sand. “How’s it taste, 8xA?” she asked jovially, chortling even harder when Right Eye shot her a hard look for that.

 

“Lucky hit, is all,” mumbled Right Eye, but a grunt pushed out of her when Jasper pressed her boot down on her back, keeping her pinned to the dirt a few minutes longer until she learned her lesson. 

 

As Right Eye shook off the hit to her pride, a wide smirk beamed across Jasper’s face and she looked to the group to find her next opponent. “You!” she decided, pointing to the Jasper with the bold red stripe on her lower right cheek. “You ready to step up?”

 

Surprised, Cheeky, as she had been nicknamed by Carnelian, held up her hands in instant defeat. “I’d love to, honestly, but I think I could really benefit from watching you show us that pile-drive move you demonstrated just now a few more times. I learn better by observing, I’m not really what you call a ‘hands-on’ kind of Gem.”

 

Unable to contain a bark of laughter at that, Jasper put her hands on her hips imposingly and shook her head. “That’s the most pathetic excuse I’ve ever heard.”

 

“Give me time, I’ll come up with even more pathetic ones,” joked Cheeky with a helpless shrug. She shrieked when the Jaspers beside her attacked and started to poke and rib her, all in good nature, for her clownish antics.

 

From the same canyon wall as Cheeky, there was a Jasper with a cleft-like marking on her chin, aptly nicknamed Cleft. Split was vertically divided between an orange right side, and red on her left. Her closest comrade, who insisted on not having a nickname as she didn’t care for Carnelian’s use of adjectives, was 2xF; with her right arm noticeably shorter than her left, she was understandably sensitive to other Gems calling out what Agate called her “obvious defect.”

 

Several Jaspers of a noticeably paler, creamier shade of orange also stood out. Tawny was the nicest, bordering on too nice sometimes, whereas her row-sister Two-Tone had a more abrasive attitude, perhaps to compensate for the fact that she was the last Jasper of their group to learn how to summon her weapon. Pale Jaw, with her pallid lower face, kept mostly to herself and didn’t engage the group as much.

 

There were four nearly-identical quadruplets who came out of Row W, who were satisfied with their assigned numbers: Eight, Nine, Ten, and Eleven. They all had similar red bands on their upper faces and left hands. Eight and Nine had thinner stripes on their left shoulders, while Ten and Eleven had more full bands there. Eight and Eleven had their gemstones located on their left thighs, whereas Nine had hers on her back, and Ten on her chest. So despite their similarities, they were distinct individuals, making it difficult to understand why the technicians at Beta had such a difficult time telling them apart.

 

A sea of orange faces kept getting riled up as the practices went on. Some were given nicknames from Carnelian based on their gemstone placements, such as Left Eye, Palmstone, and Kneecap. Others were named due to the shapes their stripes came out as, like Sunbeam, Armband, Headband, Red Nose, Necky, Red Brows, and Orange Hands. A few Jaspers had unique hairstyles that made them stand out, like Curly and Spikey, and Carnelian called them out based on that. 

 

None of these nicknames, or attempts at individualism, were approved by the Agates. When she first heard Carnelian call the Jaspers by the names she had come up with, Tumbled Peach Agate 7xE gave her a good tongue lashing for it. Carnelian hadn’t meant any disrespect, she just had a hard time remembering designations. But most of the Jaspers didn’t mind what she called them.

 

“C’mon, which of you chumps thinks you can take me on?” boasted Jasper, cracking her knuckles.

 

“Ah, so this is the life of a soldier,” quipped Two-Tone sarcastically under her breath from where she stood beside Tawny. “If we aren’t getting our stones handed to us by the Crystal Gems, we’re getting it done by ourselves. Whoopee.”

 

On the other side of her, Pale Jaw returned, “Well, we’re all they got, so they gotta toughen us up, right? We can’t just be relying on Big J whenever things get bad, we gotta become the army Pink Diamond needs us to be.” They were it. The Prime Army was hanging in there, and was still considered the alpha team, but Beta was where Pink Diamond had put all of her chips. Them. A group of largely deficient, wholly undisciplined, woefully lacking, never-even-been-to-Homeworld, made-from-sandstone Quartzes, held together by one super soldier among them.

 

Skinny had a feeling deep in her core that despite all of the fanfare about the Beta Army being the last major force keeping the Crystal Gems from their victory, their lives didn’t mean all that much to Homeworld. Obviously they didn’t mean anything to the Crystal Gems, either. So Skinny decided the only ones who were going to value their lives were themselves. It wasn’t so easy a task when their Agate was always around to remind them how worthless they were.

 

But she knew better than to voice these concerns of hers out loud. She already had enough stacked against her, she didn’t need anyone questioning her loyalty on top of that.

 

She blinked in surprise when Jasper pointed at her suddenly and said, “How about you? You haven’t been practicing much at all lately. C’mon, show everyone what you’re made of.” The other Jaspers around Skinny gave encouraging words, pushing her towards Jasper, because this was definitely a fight they would all get some enjoyment out of. Skinny knew better. She knew very well that she would get curb-stomped by her twin, just like all the others, and she had no intention of becoming a mockery that day.

 

So, crossing her arms with a droll smile, Skinny teased, “Not really feeling it right now, so why don’t you just show us some of those moves you used against the Crystal Gems last time, oh perfect leader? I mean, we haven’t really heard enough about them yet, have we?”

 

Jasper’s crooked grin rolled up the side of her mouth, and she dished the goading back. “Sounds to me like you’re jealous.”

 

That almost made Skinny laugh. “Jealous that you have all the responsibility now of making sure none of us get hurt?” she asked, cutting the reality of the situation: she and the other Betas had to trust that Jasper was going to take care of them; her mountainous twin was indispensable now. They were lucky they had Jasper. Who else could do it? Skinny? Even if she didn’t have her lanky frame, would she want to have that kind of duty on her slim shoulders? “Nah, I’m good just where I am, thanks.”

 

Jaspers just chuckled and shook her head, but let it go. 

 

What should have been a continuation of their practice matches quickly dissolved into the group finding ways to have more fun as the hot sun continued to pass into high noon across the blue sky. When Right Eye suggested maybe they ought to take some time to learn how to shapeshift their hands into a variety of weapons, just in case, Cheeky decided there was a better use for their shapeshifting, and proposed they play a game of mimicry.

 

Shapeshifting a false gemstone over her right eye, Cheeky crossed her arms and, in a gruffer voice, imitated her Beta sister. “I know I can’t win a sparring match, but that’s not _my_ fault, that’s all of _your_ faults.” Right Eye told her to frack off, but she couldn’t help but crack a small smirk at her doppelgänger’s imitation of her whining.

 

Once Cheeky had opened that door, all of the Jaspers got behind the game. Carnelian leapt at the opportunity, eager to please the others with her plethora of impressions. 

 

“Okay, guess who this is,” said Carnelian with a sly grin, distorting her body to make it taller than she normally stood. Her long berry-colored hair shortened into a tight triangle around her head, and her fingers stretched out. She brought the thumb and middle finger together in the shape of a circle that her forefinger pretended was a tablet. A visor shifted over her eyes and her face became less round, more angular. She made her frame thinner, and while her coloring remained the same, the Pink Diamond insignia molted into a Yellow one. She walked up to one of the holes in the canyon that the group of Jaspers were leaning against and shook her head. “This is all wrong, all wrong!” she exclaimed in an exaggerated, prissy voice. “Who was operating the injector, a complete clump? Well it certainly wasn’t _me_. I’m a certified Kindergartener, dontcha know?”

 

The Jaspers howled with laughter at Carnelian’s performance. Gripping her sides, Jasper 3xC - or Missing Tooth as she was called due to a large gap in her upper teeth - said, “You got Peridot 14xO down pat, Carnelian.”

 

Cleft cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “Do Peridot 6xL!”

 

Carnelian shifted her appearance faintly, shrinking a little, growing some freckles, and moving the false Peridot gemstone from her chest to her palm. In a nasally voice she screeched, “Did I ever tell you brutes about the Kindergarten I made on planet blah blah blah?”

 

“Only a million times!” cackled Tawny. 

 

“That Kindergarten was _so_ perfect,” continued Carnelian-Peridot, “that even Yellow Diamond was jealous!” Her audience erupted into giggle fits again, Cleft stomping the bottoms of her boots into the ground, and Jasper practically smacking Skinny across the sand when she slapped her shoulder in mirth. Carnelian bowed with a cheerful beam on her face, shapeshifting back to her normal appearance before calling out, “Hey, Beefy, you’re up!” 

 

“Oh yeah?” Jasper cracked her knuckles again, walking up beside Carnelian and said, “Alright, how about this?” She shrank until she was just shorter than the average Jasper. Her uniform altered to include a dark pink cape, and her boots transformed into heels while her long mane of hair curled up into tight, striped buns on her head. She grew a fake, triangular, peach-colored gem on her right arm. Placing her hands intimidatingly on her hips, she looked at the other Betas and sneered. “Is _this_ it? I can’t believe they took me away from terrorizing the Prime Quartzes to look over the likes of _you_! The Amethysts may be boorish and uncouth, but at least they don’t hurt my eyes to look at! You’re all nothing but jokes!” 

 

The other Jaspers and Carnelian busted out laughing again at the parody. “Oh stars, that’s so her!” said Nine. One of her nearly-identical row-twins, Ten, ribbed her and called out, “Hey, Tumbled Peach Agate, what do you think of this planet?”

 

“This planet is rubbish!” Jasper-Agate declared, kicking sand at Carnelian for good measure, who shielded her face from the onslaught, snickering impishly. 

 

“Tumbled Peach Agate would totally dissipate you if she saw you right now,” laughed 2xF.

 

“As if anyone could poof _this_ mountain,” came the voice of Skinny as she swaggered up to the false Agate. She had shapeshifted into Jasper, thick muscles replacing her spindly limbs and long hair flowing from her normally short mop; had it not been for her own stripes and navel gem, she would almost have been the spitting image of her Beta sister. 

 

Jasper reverted back to normal while the others doubled over in their guffaws at Skinny’s mimicry. Skinny displayed her now-impressive biceps, boasting, “Yeah, I came out of the ground flexin’, pretty much single-handedly kept the Crystal Gems from taking the Kindergarten, no big deal.”

 

Crossing her own real muscular arms, Jasper smirked at her doppelgänger. “Jealousy’s really not a flattering look on you.”

 

“You’re not a flattering look on me, period,” quipped Skinny with a droll smile, earning hoots and hollers from the other Jaspers, which made it worth being tackled to the ground by her sororal twin. She deflated immediately into her gangly form and was helpless when Jasper put her in a headlock. The droll smile never left her face even as she did not bother putting up a fight. It was hardly the first time she’d found herself in such a position, after all. 

 

“You always have something funny to say, don’t you, brat?” Jasper asked, her crooked grin widening. “Don’t you know better than to provoke someone so much bigger than you?”

 

“Yeah, yeah.” Skinny rolled her eyes. “We all know you popped out with your helmet on, and that’s really intimidating and all, but it’ll never change the fact that I came out first.”

 

Jasper scoffed. “Are you trying to call me overcooked? You must have confused me with the runt over there.”

 

“Hey, I came out before either of you!” shouted Carnelian defensively, and she attacked Jasper, who laughed when the little Gem tried to pull her arm off Skinny. It was like trying to budge an immovable object. Jasper wrapped her free arm around Carnelian’s midsection and tucked her snuggly against her side, leaving her short legs to kick freely in the air. The massive Quartz smugly asked the other Betas, “Anyone else want to try something?”

 

The Jaspers kept guffawing at the pitiful sight of Skinny and Carnelian dangling impotently in Jasper’s grasp. But all at once it was like they were dowsed with ice water, as their faces fell with a grimace and all traces of high spirits left them. When Jasper turned around to see what had robbed them of their gaiety, she found herself abruptly face-to-face with Tumbled Peach Agate, accompanied by two Peridots standing behind her. She instantly dropped Carnelian and Skinny, and all of the Betas scrambled to get in formation while giving the accustomed Diamond salute. 

 

Tumbled Peach Agate raised an eyebrow and frowned. She began pacing up and down the lines, giving each Quartz a cold glare in the eye. “You were all instructed to practice your techniques for combat, and yet here you are, acting like a lot of fools. Peridots 6xL and 10xO here will brief you, but long story short, the Crystal Gems have been spotted on the outskirts of Facet 9, and our Diamond has prepared a strategy that will finally put us back on the offense. And since you have made time for such idiocy as I have just found you engaging in, then you must all be ready for your platoon to be sent out.” She stopped where she was marching when she reached Jasper, and her frown deepened. “Do you find all of this amusing?”

 

“No, Tumbled Peach Agate,” answered Jasper, giving her senior officer the response she knew she wanted to hear, feeling suddenly humiliated for having dared to have some fun when the group should have been practicing.

 

Nevertheless, the frown didn’t leave Tumbled Peach Agate's face. “Oh, well it seems like you do. By all means, simply continue behaving like a bunch of undisciplined sandbags, that obviously worked so well for you pebbles during the raids. How many of you were cut down, again, because you couldn’t fulfill your duty as soldiers?” That cut into them quick, right to the core, reopening those fresh wounds in all of them. Poking Jasper on the diamond insignia on her uniform, Agate stressed, “I would have thought _you_ might have served as a better example, given your record in battle thus far.”

 

Tightening her bottom lip in, Jasper felt her cheeks heat up in embarrassment. Tumbled Peach Agate was right. She had screwed up. She should have set a better example, she shouldn’t have let herself get roped up in the others’ antics, she should have put a stop to it and got them back to practicing. If the others were looking up to her, she had to act like they would expect a leader to. She was better than this.

 

Skinny gave her a pitying look from the corner of her eye. Increasingly, her twin had been getting notice from the upper management of Homeworld’s military. Everyone apparently knew by now her unbelievable feat on their first day after coming out of the canyons, how she had, unaided, taken down eighty Crystal Gems before the sun had set. She was making more and more of a name for herself, but Skinny could tell that with the new attention came new strains as well. The higher-ups had an eye on Jasper, and it was making her start to stress under the pressure, despite all of the posturing she did. It was part of why Skinny kept trying to find ways to get her to lighten up, to deflate her ego a bit; there was no way all of this could be good for her. 

 

“You!” barked Tumbled Peach Agate at Skinny, catching that the lithe Jasper’s attention had drifted elsewhere. “Face forward!” Skinny gasped and stared straight ahead, beads of sweat dripping down her temples, not wanting to bring anymore of Agate’s scrutiny on her. “Alright, now all of you, prepare to leave, immediately.”

 

“Yes, Tumbled Peach Agate!” The Jaspers and Carnelian saluted again and marched off with towards the warp pad. 

 

This was it, Jasper thought. Finally Pink Diamond was sending her team out to fight for her, to finally start turning this war around. All that mattered now was the mission. She had to prove they could handle it, she had to show Homeworld that they could put their faith in the Beta Army, in her particularly. Even though she was no tactician, no military genius, she now had to figure out how to use the Gems serving under her effectively. She was just another young, fresh Gem, lucky enough to have come out stronger than the others. She had no experience; just luck, and she didn’t want to rely on that. 

 

Watching the soldiers march away, Tumbled Peach Agate shook her head and muttered derisively, “ _Quartzes,”_ earning a chuckle in agreement from the Peridots. 


	3. The Ice Caverns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jasper and her platoon are sent on a mission to the Ice Caverns to retrieve a weapon the Crystal Gems have stolen from Pink Diamond. Easier said than done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long gap between these chapters. I've been going through a lot. I do want to get this re-uploaded though. Thanks to everyone who has left kudos and comments.

The winds howled mercilessly on the top of the mountains, sending a low whistle through the deep canyons below. It was dark. It was icy. It was an all-around uninviting place, so unlike the warm and welcoming desert of Beta that they had come to call home. Practically all of them hated it, but they weren’t here to enjoy the scenery. They were on a mission. 

 

“It's been ten days and I’m already sick of this place,” complained Cleft, kicking a rock on the path they were walking on, accidentally hitting Tawny across her shoulder. The other Jasper whipped around, swiftly summoning a spear from her chest, her eyes startled and wide in alarm, seeking out the enemy who had attacked her. Cleft raised her hands defensively, showing she was no threat. “Whoa there, calm down. It was just me - ow!” She grimaced when a hand smacked the back of her head.

 

“Cut it out,” commanded Jasper, not bothering to mask the irritation in her voice.

 

Beside her, Skinny wryly noted, “She’s got a point, though, I do kind of miss the sand.” The cold cavernous mountains they found themselves on for this mission could not have been more different than the red, familiar canyons of their home. To be sure, there was a sort of beauty to the cool blues and greys and whites of the snowy rocks that made up the landscape they now found themselves in, but the icy wind that blew in their faces, crusting their eyes and freezing their hair, was infinitely less desirable than the desert storms of Beta. 

 

The Jasper with a gem on her kneecap asked irately, “At what point do you think they’re going to call it off?”

 

“Hopefully soon,” quipped Two-Tone, crossing her arms. “I hate this place. I’d rather be chewed out by Agate for days than be here for another hour.”

 

Jasper growled under her breath, annoyed at how restless the group was becoming. It hadn’t even been two weeks since they’d been sent out on the mission, and already the army was starting to show its lack of discipline. It wasn’t their fault Homeworld had had no time or resources to train them properly for away missions, but that hardly mattered; if Agate heard about it, she was still sure to hear an earful and no doubt get much of the blame if anything went wrong. So she told the others, “We’re not leaving, not until we find the Crystal Gems.”

 

“We lost all track of them four days ago!” Right Eye snapped. She brushed her icy hair out of her face and pointed a harsh finger at Carnelian. “We lost them because _she_ took us down the wrong path!” The little Gem’s orange eyes widened in shock at being blamed so openly and brusquely, and she felt her cheeks heat up.

 

“Hey, cool down,” intercut Skinny, standing in front of Carnelian defensively, “the tracks in the snow were leading that way and they just suddenly stopped. Carnelian wasn’t wrong, the Crystal Gems tricked us.” She gasped when Right Eye roughly grabbed her by the front of her uniform and brought her threateningly close to her face; her single golden eye was full of rage and fear. 

 

“Listen, you twig, she still got us all lost and I’m tired of just walking around waiting to be attacked!” All of the Beta Quartzes had a healthy fear of ambush. It was the first memory any of them had. The waiting in-between only made it so much worse, knowing that their enemies were out there, most likely preparing to strike at them when they least expected it; it was how the Crystal Gems operated, they fought like guerrillas, not a trained army. Any little noise would startle the Betas, and the planet had a lot of organic life on it, so all of the sudden rustling and scampering of Earth animals startled them, making them all too acutely aware of their own fears. It wasn’t right, soldiers shouldn’t be so easily cowed, they knew that now. It was beginning to put them all on edge.

 

But none of that made fighting amongst the ranks acceptable. Jasper pried Right Eye off of Skinny and glowered at her. “I said to cut it out!” she commanded. “You think losing your head is going to make things any better?”

 

Split and 2xF put calming hands on Right Eye’s shoulders in an attempt to get her to relax, and she begrudgingly admitted, “Sorry, I’m just so frustrated that we can’t find any trace of them. It’s like they just disappeared into thin air!”

 

“They’re _in_ the mountain, somewhere,” said Jasper, shielding her eyes from the snowy wind as she looked up and examined at the mountain they were climbing. “Obviously, if we find the entrance, we’ll find them.”

 

Kneecap skeptically raised an eyebrow, shaking her head in disagreement. “What makes you so sure that they’re even still around? What if they went to the nearest warp pad and just left? What if it was all just a decoy to get us out of the Kindergarten so they could launch another attack?”

 

“I’m sure Agate or one of the Peridots or whoever would have sent a message to our communicators if that happened,” retorted Skinny, crossing her arms. There were other platoons left behind at the Beta Kindergarten to guard it for just that reason, although she knew what was at the core of Kneecap’s fear: could even the other platoons hold the Crystal Gems back without Jasper there to defend it?

 

“Besides,” said Carnelian as she pulled ahead and climbed over a snowbank in the pathway, “we know that they were carrying the Shooting Star when we saw them. I bet they were taking it inside the mountain to find a safe place to hide it.” Her eyes got big in bewilderment and thrill, excited by it all. “I wonder what it does.”

 

“It’s some type of weapon, no doubt. A _stolen_ weapon, at that,” Jasper remarked, following Carnelian, and the other Jaspers trailed along behind them. “Pink Diamond’s orders were clear: we need to retrieve it and wipe out any Crystal Gems in this sector.” It had become obvious that they were woefully underprepared for this mission. This was something more seasoned soldiers should have been sent on, perhaps the Primes. Yet, that made Jasper stupidly proud, that Pink Diamond thought so highly of her Betas that she would choose them instead for something so significant. 

 

The force of the wind was worsening, driving ice and snow into their faces. The Jaspers that had helmets with visors summoned them, while the others tried to make due with just their arms for shields. Worse yet, it was getting even dark, as the midnight hour traveled across the sky. Trying to find an entrance in the daytime was already difficult enough, but in the night hours it proved to be practically impossible. 

 

“Frack this white stuff!” exclaimed Headband, taking a wild swipe at the thick snowflakes in front of her line of vision. 

 

"I can’t see anything,” called out Split. Over a hundred glowing yellow eyes seemed lost in the fog of the ice storm. Even the Betas’ night vision, unique to them without even their knowledge, was useless in this weather.

 

Cleft suggested, “Let’s light ‘em up then,” and the gem on her left hand glowed brightly, casting an orange light straight ahead of the group. 

 

Jasper immediately reached over and grabbed the top of Cleft’s hand with her own, smothering the light. “Do you just want to give away our location?! Think for once, you pebblehead!” She turned around, missing the rude gesture Cleft sent in her direction behind her back. 

 

But that got the Jaspers to start arguing amongst themselves again, some wanting to continue climbing up the mountain for the sake of their Diamond, others wanting to sit and lay a trap, and others wanting to just complain for the sake of complaining. Skinny rolled her eyes as a hundred voices shouted at each other, dryly quipping to Jasper, “Well if a light doesn’t give us away, all of this noise definitely will.”

 

“Should we go back?” asked Missing Tooth with her slight lisp.

 

“And do what?!” Right Eye demanded.

 

Missing Tooth shrugged, growing uneasy at all the hostility starting to pick up from their ranks. “Regroup. Tell Pink Diamond we know the traitors are in the mountains somewhere. Maybe she’ll send a ship and just blow this rock up.” That earned her a knock upside her head by Right Eye.

 

Carnelian frowned and sat down on a nearby boulder, resting her cheeks in the cups of her hands with a sigh. “I bet the Quartzes in Prime could have done this.…”

 

“We can’t give up!” Jasper stressed to the group, stepping forward to rally them back together. It was her duty, she could not let them to grow too worried or scared. They were Quartzes, they were made of sturdier stuff than that, even if they were from Beta. “We can’t go back empty-handed, we can’t disappoint Pink Diamond like that.” Frowning at the demoralized faces that stared up to her now, she got even more emboldened. “Hey! Even the Amethysts would’ve probably quit by now, but not us! We’re Jaspers! We’ll keep going, until we get what we want!”

 

The other Jaspers began to agree, but Right Eye cut ahead of them, brushing past her platoon leader, and paced back and forth in the snow irritably, declaring, “We could search this mountain for weeks and never find the entrance! We’d probably spare time just by digging out a tunnel ourselves, right here, until we connect to one of theirs. But I still think the better idea would be to set up a trap.”

 

“Then what?” asked Jasper, her tone unmistakably sarcastic. She was rapidly losing patience with how the group was falling apart, of Right Eye’s insubordination in particular. “Wait here even longer for them to set it off? How long do you think that would take, huh? Weeks? Months? You don’t think _that_ would be a giant waste of our time?”

 

Right Eye’s gem glowed, irritating Jasper with the way she shined it directly in her face. “We lure them here,” she said, kicking up snow from the path with the toes of her boots. “We’ll design a trigger to set off and blindside them. Something like…something like….” She grunted suddenly when her foot sank deeply into the snow on something metal on the ground, and in the blink of an eye a series of dull blue lights flashed under the snow they were standing on, illuminating even under the ice to give an eery gleam that certainly didn’t mean good news.

 

“Something like that?” Carnelian asked worriedly, and all of the Quartzes grimaced when a loud sequences of * _beeps_ * sounded an alarm.

 

“It’s a bomb!” Jasper exclaimed, and no sooner had she said that then the ground erupted from under them. Snow, dust, rocks, and smoke blew up violently in the air as the bottom cracked and crumbled beneath their feet. The explosion sent various Jaspers immediately flying into the air and off the mountainside, deep into the abyss of the foreboding dark canyons. The pathway was split, disintegrating quickly in a gulf, separating the Betas, who scrambled amidst their shattered senses to cling to their sides of the collapsing cliff. Several did not make it to the safety of the ledges in time; Headband and her sisters beside her fell down with the rocks and snow into the dark ravine eight-thousand feet below. 

 

On one side of the chaos, Tawny jumped out of the way of falling rocks, and the quadruplets Eight, Nine, Ten, and Eleven formed a chain and saved one another from the deep drop. On the other end, Kneecap and 2x4 kept Split from falling into the ravine. Cleft clawed her way up the crumbling rubble, and almost lost her footing before Carnelian clasped her hand in both of hers and helped pull her back up. 

 

Jasper gripped hold of a jutting rock to keep from getting swept off the side of the cliff, and with her free hand she caught Skinny midair by her ankle to keep her lanky sister from being brutally blown off. Dangling upside down, Skinny’s yellow eyes widened when she spotted Right Eye clinging desperately to a large, but brittle, icicle, suspended over the shadowy gorge. Everything was happening so fast, it was all becoming disorienting. Yet even through her foggy senses, Skinny could see the icicle starting to crack, and reached out with her arm to try and grab Right Eye. 

 

But as Right Eye’s fingers brushed her own, the icicle snapped in half. Skinny strained to reach her sister in time by stretching out her arm, all she had to do was grasp her hand, but it was too late. Right Eye fell, the light from her eye gem faded out as she tumbled into the murkiness of the ravine. 

 

Still dangling helplessly, Skinny sighed, a sad frown falling on her face, and she mused solemnly, “Maybe they all survived….”

 

Narrowing her eyes soberly, Jasper looked away, hair whipping across her face from the cold wind. “Yeah, maybe….” She pulled her and Skinny back up the ledge, where the other Betas were collecting themselves. Across the now mile-wide gulf, the Jaspers that had been separated started pinging their communicators. 

 

Tawny’s voice was the one that came through from the static. “Well, we’re stuck here. I don’t think any of us can stretch out that far and keep our forms together. What should we do?”

 

“Can any of you make it over with the spin dash?” asked Skinny.

 

One of the quadruplets, Eleven, said, “Not without a longer and clearer path to take off.”

 

Jasper balled her fists at her sides in frustration but tried to keep a level head. It wouldn’t do anyone good to start acting irrationally right now. But they had walked right into that trap. That had been sloppy. If she had had better leadership over her team, that wouldn’t have happened. Her platoon wouldn’t have been separated in two, and she wouldn’t have lost Right Eye, Headband, and the others over the side of that cliff. She needed to be better. Get it together. Everyone was counting on her. Not just her platoon, but her Diamond, as well. 

 

Finally, into her communicator she said, “If they didn’t know we were here before, they do now. Take the group and circle back around. See if there’s another way back up here. And be on your guard, they wouldn’t have set this trap if we weren’t so close to what they’re hiding.”

 

“Wonder if they got anymore surprises like that waiting for us,” Skinny pondered, brushing her frostbitten hair out of her face, trying to mask how shaken she felt from the whole experience behind her casual veneer. She could not forget how frightened Right Eye looked before she fell, and she did deeply wonder if Quartzes could survive a fall from that high, especially brittle Betas made from sandstone. If only she had reached out a little farther….

 

Carnelian stood up from where she had been kneeling down in the snow and presented to the group three orange-and-yellow gemstones in the cups of her palms. “Starstripe, Cheeky, and Left Eye all poofed.”

 

Skinny lit the gem on her navel, so that they could examine their sisters more closely. “Are any of them chipped?” she asked, picking up Starstripe’s to inspect it for injuries.

 

Shaking her head, Carnelian said, “I don’t think so.” 

 

“Good,” said Jasper motioning for Skinny to turn off the light of her gem. “Then put them somewhere safe, but we can’t wait around for them to reform right now. We’ve lost any element of surprise we might have had, so we need to get ready.”

 

“Uh, I think it might be a little late for that,” remarked Cleft, pointing over her shoulder at a large snowbank ahead of them. Just beyond it, against the snowy sky, they could make out the impending silhouettes of a horde of Gems quickly advancing their way. And the Beta Quartzes knew those were not Homeworld Gems coming to greet them. But in a way, a surprising sense of relief washed over them as they readied their weapons. The waiting before battle, after all, was the worst part of war.

 

“Finally!” said Jasper with a grin, summoning her helmet.

 

They were mostly Benitoites. 

 

The miners of Homeworld, Benitoites were about the size of Bismuths, and hardly any less bulky. Their skin was icy blue, and wild hair shocking white, almost as if they had been specifically made for the terrain the factions now found themselves on that mountain. Various colorful stars replaced the diamonds that had once been on their uniforms, marking them as traitors to their planet. All of them carried large pickaxes in their hands, fully prepared to turn their mining tools into weapons against the soldiers advancing on them. 

 

Amongst their little army were other Gems as well: Rubies, some Citrines, three Topazes, and a couple Morganites. But mostly Benitoites. The closest thing the Crystal Gems probably had to a uniform army. That was how the Crystal Gems operated, though. They didn’t have enough of any one type of Gem, they had no choice but to combine their teams into a ragtag group of rebels. And nowhere among this particular group stood the leader of the traitors herself, Rose Quartz. 

 

One of the Benitoites stepped ahead of her line. Her face was ragged and hard from the ice storm, and she narrowed her eyes gravely when she called out, “This is your only warning: leave now, or join us.”

 

Jasper laughed at her audacity. “I don’t think you’re in a position to be ordering us around. You’ve stolen a Homeworld relic, to say nothing of turning traitor to your Diamonds. If you hand it over, maybe Pink Diamond will be merciful.”

 

A chuckle escaped under Cleft’s breath. “You gotta admire their spunk, though,” she admitted, “being so outnumbered and still thinking they can fight us.” Even with the Beta platoon split in half, they outnumbered the meager defense force of the Crystal Gems. How stupid of Rose Quartz, thought Jasper, to leave such a powerful weapon, such as the Shooting Star, behind with so small an army.

 

The Benitoite who had spoken, who seemed to be their leader, turned to address her friends. “What’s going to happen isn’t going to be in vain, don’t forget that, girls.” She smiled when her fellow Gems proudly smacked their hands on their chests in solidarity. “Just remember what Rose Quartz said.”

 

“Rose Quartz?” Jasper’s brows bridged at the top of her gem at the sound of that name. Ever since she’d emerged from her hole, she longed to come face-to-face with the leader of the rebellion: the Quartz responsible for betraying the court of Pink Diamond, for turning gemkind against gemkind; the Quartz guilty for her ever being made in the first place. Rose Quartz was everything. The mere idea of confronting such an enemy made Jasper restless with excitement. “Is Rose Quartz hiding in the caverns, cowering behind the likes of _you_?” she asked, a manic grin spreading slowly over her face with each word. “Tell her to quit being such a coward and come out and fight me!”

 

A Benitoite with a gem on her forehead scowled. “Rose Quartz isn’t a coward! And she isn’t here, you already missed her!”

 

Her leader sharply glared at her. “Hush! Don’t tell them anything else!”

 

Jasper’s grin quickly fell into a dissatisfied frown. “Oh, well that’s a shame.” It didn’t matter that she would have been in no way prepared to fight a seasoned veteran like the infamous Rose Quartz; something deep within Jasper wanted that confrontation, and she was disappointed that it wasn’t going to be happening anytime soon. Another day, perhaps. 

 

The leader of the Benitoites said gravely to her Gems, “Take down as many as you can. For Rose Quartz and freedom!” With a cry she gave the signal and the Crystal Gems prepared their weapons and stampeded at the Quartzes.

 

This was a feeling familiar to Jasper, one she had come to know intimately. The rush of running head-first into battle. The bloodlust of enemies prepared to attack her. It got her adrenaline pumping. At this point in her life, it was all she knew how to do. She looked over her shoulder at her army and commanded, “Sweep out and enclose them on all sides. Don’t let any of them escape.”

 

Both factions launched their attacks. Snow blew blindingly in the air as they collided on the perilous cliffside. Jasper rhino-charged at her enemies, knocking into them directly, sending them crashing on all sides into the snowbanks. She whipped back around, hammering one Topaz down with her helmet, and chucking another over the cliff. A Benitoite flung her pickaxe into one of the other Jaspers, poofing her. Cleft repaid her for her troubles by cleaving into her with her own axe, making the miner dissipate in a quick puff of blue smoke. Kneecap grabbed a Benitoite’s arm before the Crystal Gem could bring down her weapon, and tossed her over her shoulder. Another Benitoite blocked the attack from Split’s spear with the handle of her own weapon, and the two pushed at each other forcefully in a battle of wills. With the Benitoite preoccupied with glaring down Split, she didn’t even notice 2xF behind her until she felt the acute pain of a sword slicing through her shoulder. Three of Rose Quartz’s rebel Rubies linked arms and fused, then plowed through their enemies with the force of a tank, causing two Jaspers to topple over the edge of the ravine. But most of the Quartz soldiers shook it off and charged back, tackling the other Gem to the ground, unfusing them, and pummeled them until their forms retreated back into their gemstones. 

 

Two Benitoites descended upon Skinny with their pickaxes poised, but the slender Jasper struck the ground with the butt of her spear and pole-vaulted over them. Before they could turn back around, she quickly skewered them both. As the two gems fell to the ground, Skinny then suddenly found herself driven face-first into the snow when one of the Crystal Gems slammed into her. She rolled over onto her back in time to see the sharp end of a pickaxe being leveled down at her head. Her eyes widened in panic. She ducked her head to the left just as the pickaxe came down, hitting the cold earth instead. She ducked again to the right when the Benitoite struck at her again, and this time she kicked her away with one of her long legs. 

 

The Benitoite staggered backwards on the slippery ice for a moment, steading herself against a jutting rock, but regained her footing and prepared to launch an attack again. Out of the blue, a red ball of hair collided with her head, knocking her down with a * _thud_ *. Carnelian unrolled out of her spin dash and, summoning her club from the gem on her left shoulder, whacked the Crystal Gem on her noggin again when she tried to get back up.

 

With a grin, Carnelian flashed Skinny a peace-sign, and the lanky Jasper returned it with a thumb’s-up. They both gasped, however, when a Crystal Gem shoved another Jasper out of the way and descended upon them. “What’s this?” asked the Benitoite with a gem on her forehead brusquely, grabbing Carnelian roughly up by her scalp. 

 

“Ow!” screamed Carnelian, trying to beat at the fist holding her up with her club, to little avail. “Put me down!” 

 

The Benitoite seemed amused by her desperate wriggling. “Ha! They make soldiers pint-sized now? Rose Quartz would love to see _you_!” When she saw Skinny lower her spear with a threatening gleam in her eyes, she laughed, ignoring the kicking and squirming Gem in her grasp. “And are _you_ supposed to be a Jasper? Well frack me, I never in my life thought I’d ever see a Jasper that was as skinny as a rod. Ha, if only Biggs was here to see this! Garnet was right, Homeworld really _is_ starting to get desperate!” 

 

Skinny narrowed her eyes, but then smirked. “It’s a good thing you obviously love the sound of your own voice so much. Because now I get to do this.”

 

The Benitoite’s smile dropped and she blinked, confused by Skinny’s remark. “Wha-” Before she could complete her thought, Skinny thrust the long pole of her spear between the miner’s legs and with a sharp pivot of her heels tripped the Crystal Gem over it. Once the Benitoite’s grasp on her loosened, Carnelian raised her club above her head with both hands and brought it down hard when she landed on the Gem’s chest, dissipating her. 

 

The battle fell into the Homeworld Gems’ favor when the Benitoites began to break their formations; they were miners, after all, not an army, and that kept it from feeling like a _real_ victory to Jasper, who had wanted to battle with Rose Quartz’s actual main guerrilla forces, not some dirt diggers. A couple tried to retreat by running up the mountainside, but the Jaspers cut them off. One by one the Crystal Gems were poofed until the last one remaining, their leader, laughed, catching Jasper off guard. “Just what’s so funny?” she demanded to know, arching an eyebrow in irritation. 

 

“You’ve wasted your time,” said the Crystal Gem with a determined and satisfied smile. “The Shooting Star’s been safely hidden. We finished walling it up just before you got here. You’ll never get to it in a thousand years. Go tell _that_ your Diamond.”

 

Jasper gritted her teeth and in vexation she reached out and twisted the gem on the Benitoite’s upper right arm, dissipating her back into it. The battleground was now quiet, save for the sounds of the icy wind blowing around them. Sweeping her eyes up the path from where the Benitoites had run to confront them, Jasper could spot in the snow-lit night the faint outline of a dark hole in the mountainside: the entrance to the caverns. The Benitoites’ leader had to be lying to them, in a futile last attempt to get them to leave without their prize. But Jasper was not so easily dissuaded. She pointed to two other Jaspers - ones Carnelian had nicknamed Spikey and Criss-Cross - and ordered to them, “You two, collect all of the gemstones before they regenerate. The rest of you, follow me.”

 

When they entered the caves they all lit up their gems, having no reason to fear anymore attacks from the Crystal Gems. The ice caverns were undeniably beautiful, with seemingly every inch of them covered in icicles and ice-covered rocks so intrinsically carved they looked like crystals, reflecting the orange lights back dazzlingly, like a thousand twinkling diamonds. But while the other Betas were enraptured by its glamor, so unlike anything they had seen at their Kindergarten, Jasper kept striding forward until the light from her nose revealed a large crystalline boulder tightly blocking off the entrance to the next tunnel. She ran her hand over it; the rock was smooth but durable, put there intentionally to keep intruders out.

 

Behind her she heard Kneecap say, “I bet they plugged up all the holes with these things.”

 

Jasper knew her comrade’s observation was astute, but she could feel how close they were to successfully completing their mission. All they had to do was tear down these last obstacles. They had come too far to stop now. All she could think of was how happy Pink Diamond would be if they presented her with the Shooting Star, if _she_ could take back what Rose Quartz had stolen; more than anything, Jasper wanted to make Pink Diamond happy. 

 

She curled her fist and smashed it against the stone. It sent a strong vibration throughout the cave, chipping off bits of ice and rock from the ceiling to drift over them like dust. Yet all the hit had to show for it was a small crack across the glassy surface. Jasper hit it again, and then again, but it barely splintered anymore. So used was she to her natural strength, never confronting something she couldn’t overcome, Jasper scowled and resummoned her helmet. And with a thrust of her sturdy neck muscles, she slammed the battering ram down onto the boulder. 

 

The whole cave seemed to shake from that violent impact, and several massive icicles and icy stones crumbled from the ceiling, dropping down on the soldiers below. “Whoa!” Skinny cried out, jumping out of the way of a sharp icicle before it crashed where she had been standing, shattering into a thousand pieces. “Uh, maybe we ought to rethink this plan.”

 

But Jasper paid the warning no heed, and just kept headbutting the crystal over and over, causing even more giant jagged rocks and ice shards to rain down on the Betas, threatening to mash them. The turbulent vibrations were beginning to feel like an earthquake, like the area surrounding them was going to fall apart. Carnelian ducked to avoid an immense boulder that almost smashed her to pebbles, and feverishly pulled on Jasper’s leg. “Stop, Beefy,” she pleaded, “it’s going to make the whole place cave-in!”

 

“No, we can’t stop now!” Jasper yelled, shaking Carnelian off before ramming into the immovable obstacle yet again; but the more she cracked it, the more violent the tremors shook the cavern, sending the other Jaspers fleeing in spite of her orders. “Stop retreating!” commander Jasper, a desperate glint in her yellow eyes. “I said, stop retreating! We can do this!”

 

“No, we can’t!” Skinny exclaimed, shielding her head from the rapidly fragmenting debris, which now fell despite whether or not Jasper was headbutting the obstruction blocking them from their prize. “Just taking down one of these is collapsing the cave. The Crystal Gems set it up this way on purpose. We’ll be buried if we keep doing this. We have to go back!”

 

When Skinny pulled on her arm, Jasper bared her teeth furiously, but the truth of what she was saying washed over her, much colder than the blizzard outside: they couldn’t get to the Shooting Star. At best, Homeworld might be able later to bring in more specialized Gems to try and get around the obstacles without causing a cave-in, but chances were more likely that as soon as they left, the other Crystal Gems were going to come back and fortify the ice caverns even more. And if they kept going at it, if Jasper caused a cave-in, they would become trapped. Then, chances were, it would be the Crystal Gems who found them first. They would become prisoners-of-war. Or worse.

 

They may have defeated the Benitoites, but they had failed the greater goal. They failed their mission. She had failed Pink Diamond. 

 

Jasper punched the crystal boulder once more in a moment of rage, but then she, Skinny, Carnelian, and the rest of their group withdrew from the ice caverns before they could be trapped in. 

 

In the aftermath, in their quest down the mountain, the Quartzes were able to reunite with Tawny, the quadruplets, and the other Jaspers that had been separated by the bomb earlier. “You guys missed everything, you lazy clods,” joked Cleft wrapping her arm around Tawny’s neck to drag her down for a noogie. The Jaspers embraced one another, happy to be reunified after such an exhausting ordeal.

 

Jasper and Skinny stood to the side as the Betas prepared for the long walk back to the warp pad. The Betas’ leader opened the communication link on her transmitter. On the transparent screen that hovered above it, Tumbled Peach Agate’s face appeared. “Is this the Jaspers from Beta?” she asked, squinting her eyes to get a clear visual out of the windy snow in the darkness. “I can barely see you. Speak up!” In aggravation, Jasper growled and lit up the gem on her nose. Agate raised an eyebrow. “Oh. It _is_ you. What is the report? Did you complete the mission?”

 

Jasper and Skinny flashed the Diamond salute, and Jasper explained, “Agate, we found the Crystal Gems and their hideout. I will send the precise coordinates, but the caverns have been fortified against further encroachment. We couldn’t advance farther without having the caves collapse in.” And in a solemn voice, she announced, “Eighteen Jaspers are also now missing in action.”

 

Agate’s eyebrows knitted together and she pursed her lips. “So you failed the mission?”

 

Trying to keep her face devoid of the anger and disappointment she was feeling at being called out so callously, Jasper affirmed, “We could not retrieve the Shooting Star, Agate.”

 

Chewing on her bottom lip, Skinny cut in, “But we did capture forty Crystal Gems, Agate.” She didn’t like the way Tumbled Peach Agate arched her eyebrow again. She could feel the Gem’s utter disgust with them through the communication link without even a word from their senior instructor. So she tried selling their victory more, ignoring the look Jasper was giving her from the corner of her eye. “Miners, ma’am, Benitoites. Maybe they have some useful information.”

 

“I doubt it,” dismissed Tumbled Peach Agate with a roll of her eyes. “But have them bubbled and sent here. I will report your failure to Pink Diamond.” Skinny wanted to snap back that it wasn’t their fault the Shooting Star had been stolen in the first place, but stayed her tongue. Jasper, for her part, could not possibly have felt more humiliated than she did at that moment. “In the meantime, reach the nearest warp pad and return to the Kindergarten immediately.” 

 

Both Jaspers gasped in spite of protocol, and Jasper argued, “But, Agate, shouldn’t we first rescue the eighteen missing soldiers?” That had been her plan, to first have her platoon scale down to the deep ravine and locate their lost sisters. To verify whether or not Right Eye and the others had survived the fall.

 

A beleaguered sigh parted Tumbled Peach Agate’s lips, like Jasper had asked her for something so unreasonable, and the drill officer turned to the side to look at another screen, and typed furiously. After a long moment, leaving the Jaspers on edge, she turned back around and announced, “Pink Diamond’s orders are for your platoon to return immediately. Leave the others behind.”

 

“But,” Jasper intercut, then immediately swallowed what she was about to say, aware of the mistake she had made. 

 

“Are you arguing the _direct orders_ of your Diamond?” cut Tumbled Peach Agate with a harsh, accusatory tone.

 

Jasper, with a fervent shake of her head, exclaimed, “Never!”

 

“Then get your platoon back here on the double!”

 

Both Jaspers looked down guiltily and flashed the Diamond salute again with a, “Yes, Tumbled Peach Agate.”

 

Their commanding Agate looked at Jasper and there was the faintest look of disappointment in her eyes, even obscured by the dark as it was. “It’s such a waste….Now get moving. Agate Cut-7xE out.” The screen signaled off, leaving the Jaspers in the cold. 

 

Skinny looked at her twin and gave a sheepish grin. “Bet she’d loosen up a little if her buns weren’t screwed so tight, eh?” When Jasper responded only with a dissatisfied frown, Skinny punched her playfully on the arm. “Ah, c’mon, Beefy, you know Pink Diamond’s not going to personally blame _you_. I mean, I know you got a pretty high opinion of yourself, but we all kind of messed up this one.” Not even that could get her to crack even the tinniest hint of a smile. 

 

Jasper instead brushed by her, saying, “Let’s just go.”


	4. Carnelian Alone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carnelian was the lone survivor of her cut in Facet 9. Sometimes the reality of her situation could still hit her hard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who left kudos on the previous chapter. If you like this please feel free to leave a comment.

Carnelian swung her legs back and forth from the edge own which she sat, in Jasper’s imposing exit hole on the side of the canyon. The desert sun was at its noon high, and the Betas were wrestling with each other in good spirits. They had been growing restless for a while. It had been a while since the Crystal Gems had last raided their Kindergarten, and given how no one ever knew when exactly an attack would occur, nor when they would be called away for a mission, it was always difficult to have peace of mind knowing that at any moment the calm could be shattered. And, apart from a couple of scouting assignments, there had been nothing to occupy their time. During those quiet interims, it was tempting for them to forget there even was a war. Had it been this serene and fun when they had first emerged, rather than them being violently ripped out in the middle of chaos and rampage, it would have been nice, Carnelian thought. She grinned when she saw Cheeky and Tawny team up on Jasper, only for them both to be suplexed by the larger Quartz. 

 

“Even when you team up, I’m out of your league,” boasted Jasper. She motioned her thumb over her shoulder to point at Skinny, who leaned against the canyon wall with arms folded, watching them casually. “Maybe you two should stick to fighting someone more on your level, like her.”

 

Skinny sucked on her teeth with a nonchalant air at the insult. “Nah, I’m good.”

 

Hands on her hips, Jasper chuckled at Skinny’s detached response, and goaded her further, “So what, you think you can’t even handle these two? Or are you just lazy? That’s it, isn’t it? You’re the biggest slacker out of all of us, always standing around and not practicing. What, do you think you’re as dainty as a Pearl or something? Come on, why don’t you try fighting me?”

 

Skinny had to fight the urge to tell her twin that all of this was all easy for _her_ to say, being the biggest and strongest Quartz of their brood, maybe the strongest Quartz of all the Earth Kindergartens, while she in comparison looked like she could be snapped in half by any other Jasper there. She simply couldn’t fight in the same style they did, all brawn and flashy weapons. Only her agility was keeping her alive, her fast work with her spear, not like the other Jaspers’ raw strength and durability. But instead of voicing this burden to her sister, who could never truly understand, a droll smirk crept up Skinny’s lips. “Well, y’know, helping you carry the weight of your ego really tires me out.” Her smile widened and she flexed one of her spindly arms, where no visible muscle could be seen. “Keeps me in peak shape, though.”

 

“I’ll fight you next, Beefy,” Carnelian called down from the hole. For a second, the Jaspers looked up at her with a dumbfounded expression on their faces, and then broke out in side-splitting laughter. Not liking to feel like she was being the butt of a joke, Carnelian curled her lip back, aggrieved at their response. “Hey, I’m serious!” 

 

Jasper wiped a tear from the corner of her eye when she managed to stop laughing. “Good one, but I’m looking for real practice, not a warm-up.”

 

An impish smirk spread over Carnelian’s face, and she narrowed her eyes, which sparkled with the hint of a threat. “Well, I mean, if you’re too _scared_ ….”

 

Cheeky chuckled, slapping her knee in mirth. “Oh silt! Carnelian’s finally snapped and has a death wish!” 

 

“Don’t kill her, she doesn’t mean it, she’s clearly let the pressure of the war get to her,” Tawny jokingly begged to Jasper, grasping her arm pleadingly. 

 

Jasper shrugged, her arrogant grin extending to her gum-line as she looked up at Carnelian, who was practically jumping at the chance to prove herself. Well, if the whelp wanted to be taught a lesson so harshly, so be it. “Okay, if you want this so bad, go ahead. I’ll even let you have the first hit.” She spread her arms, opening herself up for attack. “Better make it count though, because it’s the only hit you’re going to get, runt.”

 

Leaping out of the hole, Carnelian curled herself into her spin dash and accelerated down with such force and speed it looked like she was encircled in red flames. She slammed against Jasper’s chest like a cannonball, but the large Quartz just dug her heels into the sand, taking the strike and forcing Carnelian to bounce back off of her without harm. “There, you see?” Jasper asked pompously. What she did not expect was, however, for Carnelian to stay in her spin dash and zip back off the gorge wall and land another hit on the back of her head, knocking her off balance to crash and get a face-full of sand. The attack did not hurt her, but for a moment it shocked her that Carnelian had managed to catch her off-guard with that abrupt maneuver. 

 

The three other Jaspers laughed while Carnelian rolled up to them and uncurled with a satisfied look on her face, taking a little bow. “Guess you were wrong,” said Skinny, giving Jasper a pat on the shoulder when she picked herself up. “By my count, she got _two_ hits in.”

 

Jasper crossed her arms but laughed again, able to set aside her pride for the moment and take it in good sport. “Ha! Not too bad, runt. But you won’t surprise me like that again.”

 

“Oh, I got way more tricks up my sleeve, tricks that you don’t even know about,” said Carnelian with a slightly smug air of confidence, one the other Jaspers were glad to see. She’d long since learned that she had to rely on her speed and surprise attacks to fight the Crystal Gems. If she was fighting someone like a Ruby, that was one thing; any Quartz could beat a Ruby. Some of those Crystal Gems, however, were as big as Quartzes; some _were_ Quartz soldiers. And so many of them were well-trained, even the Gems who were noncombatants. Against those she could not just go up and start whacking at them with her club. She was too small for that. But she refused to just hide in her hole whenever the Crystal Gems attacked, and she could not always rely on one of the other Jaspers to be around to protect her, so she trained herself around her shortcomings. 

 

“Over here is what Yellow Diamond wanted us to examine,” came suddenly a voice to their side, and when the Betas looked over they spotted Peridot 6xL leading an unfamiliar Peridot over their way. The new Peridot looked young: she had a gem on her right eye and with her long fingers she stroked her chin in awe while she gazed across the Kindergarten. Peridot 6xL looked at the soldiers and said dismissively, “And here are more of the Jaspers. Jaspers, this is Peridot: Facet-3A4L Cut-1xI, she’s been sent by Yellow Diamond to assist in getting more information for the official log on your Kindergarten.”

 

“Pfft, One Eye” Carnelian laughed under her breath, making the other Quartzes chuckle too at the appropriate cut name of the new Peridot. 

 

“Is this the Jasper that emerged from the hole we needed to inspect further?” asked Peridot 1xI, gazing up at Jasper. The big soldier gritted her teeth in annoyance, but let the technician scope her out like the specimen she was. After all, this Peridot wasn’t the first Gem from Homeworld who wanted a closer look at the Facet 9 Kindergarten Quartz That Could. She was a novelty, apparently. “Hmm. Her gemstone seems irregularly shaped, compared to the others. Unfortunate.” She wasn’t deterred by the harsh glare Jasper leveled at her for that remark. Peridot 1xI looked at the large Quartz, then at the other Jaspers, and could not help but cringe when her eyes fell upon Skinny, unable to help herself. “And they’re _all_ made out of the same sandstone?”

 

Peridot 6xL rolled her eyes. “Don’t even get me started, I could go on all day about this place.”

 

“Nothing’s stopped you before,” grumbled Cheeky, making the others snicker again. 

 

The Peridots possibly hated the Beta Kindergarten even more so than the Agates did, because, while the Agates hated being there because they considered it a step down from their time spent training the favored Rose Quartzes and Amethysts from the Prime Kindergarten, the Peridots took the construction of Beta as an affront as scientists. They missed no opportunity voicing the many ways in which Beta was hands-down the worst Kindergarten they had ever encountered. Apparently not even Zeta Kindergartens could compete with the complete ineptitude it took to screw up as badly as the terraformers had with the second Earth Kindergarten.

 

So the Quartzes from Beta had quickly learned that no matter how much they associated the place with home, and all the comforts that came with that, no matter how unsafe it had been for them, it wasn’t something to be proud of. And for certain soldiers, it slowly began to sink in that it was an association from which they would never escape.

 

“Oh, is that a Carnelian? I didn’t know this Kindergarten had made Carnelians.” Peridot 1xI brushed past the Jaspers to examine the little Gem, looking her up and down with the detached curiosity of a scientist. She poked Carnelian’s head and pulled her left arm up to get a closer look at the gemstone on it, aggravating Carnelian, who pushed her back. “Hmmm. A bit small isn’t she?” 

 

“She grew in sideways,” explained Peridot 6xL, not bothering to hide a snort as she said it. “Although it’s my theory that it was actually due to her small size that she was saved from the fate of the rest of her cut. Not that it forgives the complete incompetence for how her hole was drilled, mind you.”

 

Carnelian’s eyes widened in shock. She was used to being called short, both in a humiliating and endearing way. She was also familiar with the constant criticisms of how she had emerged from her poorly-made hole, as if it had been her fault the injector had drilled it that way. But this was a revelation to her. “What do you mean?” she asked the technician. 

 

Peridot 6xL arched an eyebrow at her, like she was irritated that Carnelian had cut into their conversation, even it was regarding her. “I think your stunted dimensions compacted more strength into your gem, giving it more durability, whereas the other Carnelians who came out looking normal all had exceptionally brittle gemstones, even more brittle than usual for ones made from sandstone. That’s my theory, anyways.” She looked back at Peridot 1xI and scoffed. “I mean, just one hit and those Carnelians shattered to pieces like their gems were made of glass; even _Calcites_ aren’t that fragile. It was shoddy work all around, I tell you.”

 

“Is she otherwise functioning?” asked Peridot 1xI, giving Carnelian another curious glance over.

 

“As much as you’ll find a functioning Quartz in this place, so Pink Diamond just keeps her here with the Jaspers. That reminds me, once we’re done examining this hole for Yellow Diamond, I do want to look over some of the holes of the Carnelians. If my theory is correct, I think it will make an excellent topic to bring up on the subject of proper injector preparation.”

 

Carnelian could feel her bottom lip tremble at the way the Peridots talked so crassly about her sister Gems. She gingerly ran her right hand over the gem on her arm and wondered if what they said was true, however. “They weren’t too brittle, were they?” she asked softly. “They were just caught off guard, like all of us were, right?” The four Jaspers beside her looked down at her in surprise at how sensitively she asked the question, but the Peridots still regarded her like she was being a nuisance. 

 

“They were definitely inferiorly made, unmistakably defective even by _Beta_ standards, there’s no doubt about that,” Peridot 6xL said with another roll of her eyes, like a teacher who was fed up with trying to explain something to a pupil who just would not understand the material. She turned back to Peridot 1xI. “Carnelians are supposed to be some of the toughest, sturdiest Quartzes around, you realize; that’s the whole reason the luminous Yellow Diamond stressed for Pink Diamond to create them. But the ones that popped out here were…well, let’s just say I think it would have been much more merciful for the Peridots first assigned here to have just shattered them when they first emerged, rather than letting the Crystal Gems do it. I mean, that’s what you do normally in those situations, it’s not like they would have led very fulfilling or efficient lives. But that’s just my opinion. I guess when we’re desperate to put soldiers on the ground, any Quartz will do.”

 

She either did not notice or did not care how visibly her words were beginning to upset Carnelian, who had to bite her lower lip to keep it from trembling so much. But Peridot 6xL did notice the way the Jaspers were looking irritably down at her, faces stern and irked, so she said with a waive of her hands, “Alright, all of you need to find someplace else to do whatever it is you do. Shoo. Shoo. Dismissed. Whatever it is you call it, just go away.”

 

The Quartzes dispersed, more than glad to get away from the odious technicians and their constant negative assessments as to everything that was wrong with them and the Kindergarten that produced them. “Just what we needed,” sighed Cheeky, wrapping her hands behind her head, “more Peridots. Why does Yellow Diamond keep sending them here, anyway?”

 

“What do you think the official log’s gonna say about the Kindergarten?” asked Tawny, locking her fingers behind her head lazily. 

 

Skinny shrugged. “Probably along the lines of, ‘Homeworld’s Greatest Embarrassment’ or something like that. I mean, if it’s Yellow Diamond who’s composing the thing.”

 

With a deep furrow of her brows, Jasper countered her pessimism, “Don’t be so defeatist. This is still Pink Diamond’s colony. When we crush the Crystal Gems and retake this planet, they’ll remember our colony as the Hope of Homeworld.”

 

A smile crept up Skinny’s mouth at that. “I never thought you were such a sentimentalist.” She couldn’t help but chuckle with Jasper blushed in embarrassment.

 

Even Cheeky caught the positivity, pumping her fists and exclaiming, “Yeah, we’ll will take down this rebellion, and then those stupid Peridots will have to eat their words. Everyone’s gonna have to say the Betas were the heroes!”

 

“Except for the Carnelians, you mean,” mumbled Carnelian, wiping a hand under her nose with a sniff. “No matter what, we’ll always just be remembered as a bunch of brittle embarrassments.” 

 

Skinny’s and Cheeky’s smiles disappeared and all of the Jaspers looked down uneasily at Carnelian. “Aw, c’mon,” Skinny said in as cheerful a tone as she could muster, one that felt inauthentic. What could she say, after all, that wouldn’t feel disingenuous? “Don’t tell me you’re taking what those clods said seriously, Carnelian.” 

 

“And what if I am?” Carnelian snapped suddenly, narrowing her eyes even as they threatened to start spilling tears. “I mean, are they wrong? It’s not fair for them to say things like that! The others didn’t stand a chance but they still fought, they protected our Kindergarten, and all anyone is going to remember is that they all died because they were too brittle! It’s not _fair_!” She balled her fists and kicked up sand viciously at declaring this.

 

The Jaspers were taken back by the force she was putting behind her words, how obviously upset she was getting with each exclamation that came out of her mouth. Carnelian could be a little fireball, but they had never seen her so visibly dismayed, so clearly distraught, not since the days of the initial raids. Jasper tried consoling her, and could only think to parrot the words of their creator, thinking that would be comforting. “Remember what Pink Diamond said, when this is over and they start building the next Kindergartens, they can make more Carnelians.” The words felt off, the opposite of encouraging, even as she said them; why couldn’t she replicate the soothing reassurance in them that Pink Diamond had?

 

“I don’t want those Carnelians!” Carnelian screamed back, shaking her arms so hard they began to tremble. “I want _my_ Carnelians, I want the ones that came from here! I want them back!” She shoved Jasper’s leg to push her away before tucking herself into her spin dash and belting across the desert sand of their Kindergarten, away from them, leaving the Jaspers in her dust, dazed by her proclamations. 

 

She zipped across the canyons, zooming past other Jaspers, some of whom had to dive out of the way of her spin dash due to how haphazardly she was spinning. She suddenly did not care. She was too caught up in her own suddenly overwhelming emotions to care. It wasn’t as though she was angry with the Jaspers, however. How could she be? What happened wasn’t their faults. And it wasn’t like they did not know loss, because of course they did, they had become very familiar with it. No, Carnelian was angry at herself. Why, after all, had _she_ survived?

 

That was what their Agate kept asking. What the Peridots asked. What maybe even some of the Jaspers asked, too. Why had the Carnelian who stood scarcely taller than the waistline of the average Jasper, while the bigger and bulkier and better of her cut were all wiped out so soon after emerging? What made her capable of surviving? The technicians, the commanding officers, they were only interested in the hows, the mechanical explanations, so sure were they that the answers to all their inquiries must be so easily determined by hole alignments and gemstone hardiness.

 

It couldn’t just be because Carnelian was lucky and that her sisters were not. It couldn’t be because those other Carnelians were at the wrong place at the wrong time, it couldn’t be because they were victims of poor design - constructed haphazardly on the orders of their Diamond, no less - nor because they were defenseless against the onslaught of an enemy they had no means to prepare for. No, it had to be their fault. Even if their Gem superiors might have pitied them for their fate, even if they bemoaned the brutality of the Crystal Gems for picking off freshly-made Quartzes in the dawn of their lives, it was still those Quartzes’ faults. 

 

Because of that fact, of course the technicians would wonder why Carnelian would mourn them. It was not the policy of the army to cry over losers.

 

Carnelian did not stop until she came to a canyon wall of a more reddish coloring than the typical oranges and yellows that tinted the gorge. She looked up at the irregular holes that lined the rock face. Spotting one that indicated the Gem inside had emerged upside down, she climbed up and crawled into it. Sitting on the edge, dangling her legs over the side, a small smile sneaked up the corners of her lips and, under heavy-lidded eyes, she patted the soft inner rock. 

 

“Hey, I remember you,” she said softly. “You hit the ground pretty hard on the way out, but you smashed that Topaz real good. It’s not your fault you didn’t see the Citrine coming.” A pang hit her in her core upon recalling that moment. Those memories were full of discord, of heat and smoke, of the taste of fear and anger. Carnelian didn’t want those memories right now. She thought of the memories she and her sisters _should_ have had together.

 

“You weren’t here when they gave us our cuts,” she continued, “but maybe I would have just called you Topsy-Turvy. Agate hates it when I call anyone by anything other than their cut, she said it’s not allowed, that’s not how things are done on Homeworld. But it’s hard to keep track of it sometimes, and how am I suppose to get just one Jasper’s attention if I can’t remember their cut? It’s easy for them, since there’s only one of me. Any of them could just yell ‘Hey Carnelian’ and it’s like ‘Yep, that’s me.’” 

 

She looked over at the hole next to the one she was sitting in and scrambled to climb into it. She pressed her cheek onto the smooth side affectionately, imagining a pair of strong arms encircling around her in return, vividly recalling the image in her mind of the Gem who had once occupied it. “And _you_ could have been Elbow. Don’t think I’ve forgotten how you saved me from that Beryl. Oh, and then there’s you, Nosey,” she said, climbing up into the next hole up. She hugged the inner wall.“If that Beryl hadn’t gotten you instead, I wonder what you would think of this place. What you would think of me.…” A deep sigh escaped her. Carnelian wondered if any of the Jaspers ever thought about the Carnelians of Beta who had been lost. Whether they would think about her if she was ever shattered during a raid by the Crystal Gems. Were any of them worth remembering? Should she be even be keeping their memory alive?

 

Carnelian loved the Jaspers, but she wished she might be able to look upon a face that resembled her own. She longed for the fantasy she had put together in her mind of being in a sea of friends who looked like she did, who shared in the enthusiasm of her joys as they did the solemness of her disappointments. She wanted the company of her sisters, it was hardwired into her to bitterly feel their absence, and that feeling would never go away; because they were gone forever.

 

During moments of intense vulnerability, Carnelian allowed herself tiny nuggets of hope. Since the initial raids, she had learned more about the Crystal Gems. They didn’t always shatter their enemies; whispers passed between ears that it wasn’t typically even their style to so completely destroy an adversary like that, that something about what happened at Beta was different. After all, she hadn’t been able to ascertain that all of the other Carnelians had been accounted for when she went through their shattered remains after the raids; there had been too many pieces to be sure. So Carnelian dared to wish. She cherished the dream that somewhere, wherever the rebels kept their prisoners-of-war, there might be at least one other survivor, just one more Carnelian like her still existing on this planet being fought over. 

 

One day, perhaps, she would rescue this kidnapped sister, and they would be reunited….

 

Such dreams were silly, though. At her core, Carnelian felt utterly alone, and truly that meant she _was_ alone. There were no other Carnelians, and there never would be anymore like her. Even if Pink Diamond made more later, they would only be imitations, sore replacements meant to aimlessly fill the avoid left behind so she could finally belong to her own, but not really _hers_. Any hopes of an eventual reunification would forever remain a fantasy. Not even her Diamond could give her back what she had lost.

 

Carnelian pulled her legs into the hole and lied down on her side, facing the darkness of the back of the burrow. The hole was twice the size of her own, it was the size of a hole she should have come out of if she had been made correctly. It did not have the enclosed, snug, comfortable feeling that only came from being in one’s own hole, but for a moment it made her feel less lonely. 

 

 

 

By the time the evening sun began to set, casting an orange and purple light across the sky as the yellow star disappeared behind the sand dunes, Jasper and Skinny walked around in search of Carnelian, who had not returned to them since her outburst that afternoon. They had given her space in hopes that she would blow off whatever steam she needed, but when she did not come back later, they started to worry. Surely she would not have tried running away; Homeworld did not look kindly on deserters, to put it lightly, so she would have known better than to run out of the Kindergarten. Soon it would be time to report for formations. Better, they decided, that they go out and look for her before someone like Tumbled Peach Agate demanded to know where she was and they had no answer to provide.

 

“She's not in her hole,” said Jasper tersely, gritting her teeth as she pulled her head out of the sideways-shaped opening. “I can’t believe she’s just run off like this.”

 

“Well you _were_ being pretty insensitive,” Skinny half-heartedly tried joking, but her spirit wasn’t in it and the quip fell flat. What had transpired between them and the Peridots earlier had left her pensive, as well. The way the technicians had so thoughtlessly summarized the reason why so many Betas were being wiped out, that they had brittle gemstones, it had struck a nerve with her. 

 

A sort of confusion swelled in her core. The cognitive dissonance of hearing the Peridots acknowledge the unfortunate Jaspers and even more unlucky Carnelians were brittle and that’s why they were so easily shattered versus the Agates’ declarations of it being their own faults for coming out such weaklings started tearing at Skinny. Why hadn’t the initial technicians and terraformers simply made them better? Why hadn’t they put as much effort into crafting Beta as they did with the Prime Kindergarten?

 

Skinny couldn’t help but voice this concern aloud. “Do you think the Peridots are right? About all of us being brittle, I mean?” she asked, looking down at the oval orange-and-yellow gemstone on her navel, wondering just how little force it would take on an enemy’s part to break it. Glancing at her over her shoulder, Jasper scoffed, which didn’t satisfy Skinny as an answer. “What I don’t get is why Pink Diamond didn’t put a little more, I dunno, effort into making us.”

 

That got Jasper to whip around and throwing a stern finger in front of her face. “Hey! None of this was Pink Diamond’s fault! Those Crystal Traitors _forced_ her to rush this place into production. She did everything she could for us. Whatever went wrong, it’s Rose Quartz’s fault, don’t you forget that!” She said the words with such conviction, with such longing for them to be true, that Skinny couldn’t help but agree with her. It made sense. Yes. Rose Quartz had forced Pink Diamond’s hand and she had no choice but to hurriedly slap together a Kindergarten. And Pink Diamond was the only Homeworld Gem so far that found worth in even her most ugly of soldiers. Yes. Pink Diamond had done all she could for them.

 

Satisfied, Skinny returned to their more precessing worry. “Where do you think Carnelian went?” 

 

Jasper, having had enough searching, bellowed out, “Where are you hiding, runt?!” 

 

“Go away!” called out a little voice from one of the holes near the top of the red canyon. 

 

“Well, that was effective,” noted Skinny. She watched while Jasper began scaling up the holes and followed close behind her. The two climbed up and sat on the edges of the holes on either side of the one that Carnelian had curled herself deep into. Skinny leaned over and peered into the opening, and a warm smile let up her face. “Hey.”

 

“I said go away,” said Carnelian, though with less fervor this time. She buried her face in the crook of her arm. “Just leave me alone.” Such wallowing in her own misery would have resulted in severe punishment had it been Tumbled Peach Agate who found her, instead of the Jaspers. An army wasn’t supposed to let things like this get to them. They were supposed to move on, to forget the losers who couldn’t make it out alive. Carnelian knew this, but then wondered why Quartzes were designed to love each other so profoundly. 

 

“It’s okay to miss them, y’know?” Skinny said softly. She was the first Gem to tell Carnelian that it was okay to mourn. Skinny had lost sisters, too. All the Jaspers had. They might not know what it felt like to be the last of their cut, but they had gone through the same trauma as she had, and they had taken her in afterwards, when Homeworld didn’t know what to do with her.

 

Jasper added, “I…didn’t mean that we replace them. The ones killed by Rose Quartz and her rebels will be remembered as heroes when all of this is over.” The words sounded hollow to her own ears, but she wanted to believe them, she wanted so desperately to believe them. Everything would be worth it in the end. They just had to have faith in their Diamond.

 

Carnelian glanced over her shoulder at the two Jaspers before turning over and crawling on her hands and knees to the entrance of the hole. With a gloomy expression still etched on her features, she looked down again at the canyon wall they were sitting on. All of those holes, now so many empty. All of the ones that had produced Carnelians permanently vacant. All except for hers, the sole surviving Carnelian of Facet 9.

 

She gasped when she felt strong hands, real hands this time, on both of her shoulders, and allowed herself a small smile as she closed her eyes and leaned into the comforting hold. It felt good to remember that, in reality, she wasn’t alone. “Thanks, you guys.”


	5. From the Injector to the Recycler

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Monsoon season hits the Beta Kindergarten. As they enjoy some time wrestling in the rain, they are reminded that they were made for one purpose: to fight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who has left kudos/comments. If you enjoy this chapter, please consider leaving a comment.

“I hate this planet and its _weather_ ,” Tumbled Peach Agate complained, trying to shield her head from the pouring rain with her tablet as she stepped outside of the control room. Across the gorge, the Quartzes had all come out of their holes to experience the radical shift in climate at the Kindergarten. Over the time they had lived there, they had begun noticing a pattern: twice a year, near the hottest months, when thermals were at their most turbulent, a growing thunderhead would follow, bringing dark sweeping clouds across their valley floors. The wind kicked up the dust and sand, getting mud stuck in the Quartzes’ voluminous hair. Then the rain started falling. For Gems who had been born in a desert and so found the dry scorching heat familiar and comforting, the vigor by which this change occurred fascinated them. The water was coming down fast, and rather than absorbing into the sand, instead it rolled off the baked ground, threatening to flood the valley; it was already up to their ankles. 

 

The Quartzes didn’t care about flooding, however, since it would prove no threat to them. So they had fun in it. The thick brown paste clung to their boots, and they started kicking globs of the stuff at one another. They became jovial as they started building clumps of mud balls to start hurling at each other. Starstripe ducked in time to avoid being hit by one hurled by Ten of Row W, and instead it splattered Two-Tone in her face. With a wicked cheshire grin stretched across her lips, Cleft tackled Ten from behind in revenge, driving her face-first into the sludge. Eight, Nine, and Eleven came to their twin’s aid, ganging up on Cleft, giving her a taste of the medicine she had just dished out, which she enjoyed immensely.

 

Carnelian made a game of jumping from the top of a cliff and causing a goopy cannonball of slush as she crashed into the muddy ground, covering Criss-Cross, Pale Jaw, and Left Eye in it. Missing Tooth took a dive to grab the little Gem, but Skinny slid in at the last moment to save Carnelian, who giggled wildly as she and the lanky Jasper rolled to safety, leaving Missing Tooth to be pulled into a headlock by Jasper.

 

“See, it’s good practice,” said Skinny, standing up. She leapt nimbly at the last moment to avoid Split and 2xF colliding into her as they chased Spikey across the pass. If there was anything the Quartzes of Beta loved more than wrestling, it was wrestling in the mud. And there could be a point to it, since practicing in different conditions would undoubtedly make them better equipped as soldiers. Surely it wasn’t just an excuse to play. Soldiers didn’t play, after all.

 

“Good practice, maybe, but I hate what this mud does to my hair,” remarked Armband, a Jasper with one red stripe across her right arm, who was busily cleaning the gunk from the prominent braid she kept plaited over her shoulder. Armband was particularly fussy for a Quartz soldier, but her sisters loved her regardless, even if they enjoyed poking fun at her for it sometimes.

 

From where Jasper had Missing Tooth in her hold, she called out to Armband. “When did you get so hoity-toity? Who do you think you are, an Agate? Heh-heh! Hey!” She grimaced, spitting out the mud that Skinny had just splattered across her face, letting Missing Tooth loose in her surprise. That greatly amused her spindly twin, who brushed her dirty hair from her face to give a wink. Wiping the gunk off with the back of her arm, Jasper narrowed her eyes and flashed a muddy grin before warning, “You better run now, brat.”

 

“Betas!” cut in a harsh voice, as sharp as flint even against the patter of rain. “Ugh,” scoffed Tumbled Peach Agate, kicking some mud from her boot as she trudged up to the soldiers. “Where’s a Lapis Lazuli when you need one? Betas! To attention!” The Beta Quartzes scrambled to get into their formations, signaling the Diamond salute as they did so. With the rain pouring on them, they looked like a sorry sight indeed, with soggy hair weighing down on their heads while water dripped from every inch of their bodies. Tumbled Peach Agate could hardly imagine how they could possibly look more pathetic than they did standing there in their lines now. She eyed them all without hiding her contempt. “I can only imagine the distaste our loving, brilliant, magnanimous Diamond would feel if she could see all of you sloppy brutes right now.” She, of course, had no actual way of foretelling what Pink Diamond would think, but that didn’t matter. As an Agate, it was her duty as the commanding officer and drill sergeant to speak on behalf of their Diamond when it came to whipping the Quartzes into shape. And she wanted to believe Pink Diamond would share her disgust.

 

Even though her Diamond had ordered her to transfer from managing the Primes to the Betas, Tumbled Peach Agate 7xE could not help but innately feel humiliated. Beta was so obviously the inferior Kindergarten, and the Gems grown there were subpar. One or two promising Jaspers out of the bunch were nothing much to be proud of when the group hardly resembled what any self-respecting Agate would call an army. Even now, the Jaspers lacked discipline, staring at each other with open unease.

 

“This is not the conduct of professional soldiers!” Tumbled Peach Agate barked, scowling at Criss-Cross and Sunbeam until they both looked straight ahead again when she spotted their shared expression of bemusement. The superior officer neglected to tell them how often she had had to chastise the Amethysts at Prime for acting just as rowdy, if not more so, than the Jaspers were currently. What was it about the Earth Quartzes that made them so obstinate and boisterous? Surely this wasn’t normal, even for a bunch of brutes, not from what Tumbled Peach Agate had been taught on Homeworld. 

 

She remembered her training. She needed to be the best Agate she could, for her Diamond’s sake. Pink Diamond was undoubtedly counting on her to shape these sorry Betas into warriors. The war required nothing short of it. The Prime Kindergarten was still lost to the rebels. The troops designed from the purple rocks were stretched thinner and thinner. Beta was all they had left. How embarrassing for poor Pink Diamond.

 

Marching down the lines, she eyed the Jaspers hard, knowing she needed to be able to quell them with but a glance if they were going to truly respect and fear her. “Perhaps I have not made this fact clear to you in your training,” she stated, arching a regal eyebrow. “You are all _soldiers_. Do you know what that word means?” She stepped forward and directed the question to Jasper.

 

Caught off-guard by the sudden attention, Jasper stammered to answer, “It…It means we fight, we fight in an army, Tumbled Peach Agate.”

 

A smile crept up the corner of Tumbled Peach Agate’s lips, assuming even more of an air of smug authority. She turned back on her heel, digging up more muddy sand from the water as she resumed strutting back up their lines. Raising a stern finger in the air, she addressed the whole group again. “Do you truly understand what that means? I don’t think you do. As a soldier, fighting is your _life_. Fighting is the whole reason all of you were made. You exist only to fight on behalf of Pink Diamond. You live to fight for your Diamond, and if you are lucky you will die fighting for your Diamond. From the injector to the recycler, you are a soldier for life.”

 

By the looks on their faces, Tumbled Peach Agate thought it might have finally begun to sink in for the lot the truth behind their existences. “Many of you ugly clumps of sandstone are lucky,” she added, scrutinizing Skinny and Carnelian with her sharp gaze. “Any other time, and you hideous off color embarrassments would have been put out of your misery. You are no doubt the most embarrassing army in the history of Homeworld. But, nonetheless, Pink Diamond is relying on all of you to protect her colony from the dastardly schemes of that treacherous Rose Quartz. Take comfort in that, then. Even off color sediment such as yourselves are better than a traitor, a soldier who betrays her creator. You had better not let her down. Do you understand now?”

 

“Yes, Tumbled Peach Agate!” answered all the Betas in unison.

 

Tumbled Peach Agate still did not believe they fully understood. How could such simple-minded brutes truly comprehend it? Perhaps one day they would. “Now, to the matter at hand. We have finally received some communication from the Moon Base, now that Peridot 14xO has finally repaired the grid after one of you miserable louts broke it. We received the message two cycles late because of you!” Thankfully she missed the looks the quadruplets of Row W exchanged, remembering well how Nine had knocked Eleven onto the thing by accident; the four of them were truly lucky that their officer had such a difficult time telling them apart. “Jasper: Facet 9 Cut 5xM!” Tumbled Peach Agate called out instead. A Jasper with flowing stripes on her cheeks, whom Carnelian had nicknamed Ribbon, stepped forward, still holding her arms up in the Diamond salute. “You and your platoon have been assigned to the outpost outside of Facet 3. There are reports that rebel activity may spring up there again, so you need to guard the elites residing there.” 

 

“Yes, Tumbled Peach Agate!” shouted Ribbon.

 

“And clean yourselves up, for star’s sake, this is Blue Diamond’s court we’re talking about,” their Agate added with another sneer of disgust. Wasting no time, Ribbon and her platoon all marched to the warp pad, to be transported to the site they had been designated to. Tumbled Peach Agate waited while the group cleared by the dozen, until all the Jaspers in question were seen off, all the while the remaining Betas kept their positions at attention. 

 

Shaking her head, the drill sergeant cringed when a large clap of thunder suddenly boomed across the gorge. “Hmph. What anyone sees in this planet, I’ll never understand,” she snapped; why hadn’t Yellow Diamond and Blue Diamond given wonderful, perfect Pink Diamond are more beautiful, regulated colony? Trying to collecting herself with a strong clearing of her throat, she turned back to the Quartzes. “Now, according to the Peridots, there is something that we need to consider….” A loud groan cut her off, and when she and the soldiers looked down the line their faces dropped in shock to see the last Jasper in the formation had a long javelin impaled through her chest. A brief look of bewilderment slowly dawned over her features before she dissipated. 

 

What followed was chaos. A combination of realization tinged with fear crossed the faces of the Betas as it hit them what was happening. All of them remembered this too well. It brought back a hodgepodge of swirling emotions and sensations. They had no time to reflect on these, however. They did not have the luxury. As if they were raining from the grey sky, from the tops of the canyons, Gems started jumping down, while others came poring in from the north entrance, and in but an eye blink the Kindergarten became filled with the sounds of shouts and screams , accentuated by thunder strikes in the dark background. 

 

They were under attack. 

 

Tumbled Peach Agate ducked behind the disordered formations as the Betas practically scrambled over each other, in order to shield herself. She yelled at them, “Get out there and fight! Do what you were made to do!” 

 

They did not need to be told twice, because before half of them could even summon their weapons, the Crystal Gems were cutting through their lines and assaulting them with their own. It was a blitzkrieg. Two Citrines poofed five Jaspers, striking them down with their heavy hammers. Jasper punched one of the Citrines across her jaw, sending her flying, and when the other tried smashing her hammer on her head, Jasper manifested her helmet; the impact blew both Quartzes back in recoil. Jasper recovered first, shaking her head to clear her blurring vision, and charged over to grab the Citrine by her arm and throw her over her shoulder to crash into the canyon wall, poofing the rebel back into her gemstone.

 

All around her, her sisters struggled to recover from being caught off-guard and gain back control over the battle. It was difficult to keep a level perspective amidst all the disarray. The valley echoed with the flinch-inducing * _pops_ * of dissipation, and the smoke looked like a choking purple fog in the pouring rain creeping along the front, creating an ominous fog. Jasper swallowed her fear. Time to act on instinct. It had saved her that first riotous day of her existence, and it would guide her now yet again. She was a soldier, she reminded herself. Pink Diamond was counting on her.

 

When the first Citrine tried to stand back up, Jasper shot out a large hand and wrapped it around her enemy’s neck. Her face contorted into a scowl, her gold eyes widened in discomposure. A frenzy seized her, dampening the anxiety she tried to ignore. “Is Rose Quartz here?” she demanded through gritted teeth. The Citrine’s face lit up in surprise by her question at first, but then she grinned. When she didn’t answer, Jasper’s free hand grabbed the gemstone on her chest and tugged hard, sending her form back into it. The golden eyes then swept across the battlefield, through the orange-and-red bodies of the Jaspers, through the much more diverse Gem types that made up the traitorous rebellion; she was looking for _her_ , the Gem responsible for all of this, all of the violence, the fear, the hate, the betrayal. If she could only find Rose Quartz, if she could only shatter _her_ , all of this misery would end.

 

Find Rose Quartz. Shatter her. Do it for Pink Diamond. She had to fight. This was her life.

 

So preoccupied was she in her endeavor to find the rebel leader, Jasper never saw the sharp flash in the corner of her vision until the tail-end of a whip abruptly struck her across her face, making her stumble backwards violently. Catching her footing before she slammed into the Jaspers occupied by holding off a Bismuth, Jasper glared at the Crystal Gem who had hit her. She was an Agate, although not of the Tumbled Peach variety. Skin sunkissed-yellow, her white hair highlighted with orange and red stripes, this Agate was not their own. Her red uniform had a grey star emblazoned across it, in the middle of which rested her gemstone. The Agate reached down and picked up Citrine’s gemstone, cradling it against her chest gingerly, so unlike what one would expect from her cut. “You won’t be shattering her today,” she said, the unmistakable haughtiness of her Gem class lining every word. 

 

She wound her arm back and snapped her whip again, but this time Jasper caught the end of it and, wrapping it around her wrist, gave it a rough tug. The Beta tried pulling it the Agate for close assault, but the intervention of a large Gem who jumped on Jasper’s back saved her. Large hands reached down and pulled Jasper into a chokehold. Releasing the whip, Jasper grasped at the Gem’s arm and tried to pry her off, but the rebel’s muscular grip remained firm. Changing her approach, Jasper slammed herself backwards repeatedly into the canyon rock, over and over, and after finally crashing her head back and landing a direct blow to the Gem’s face, the Crystal Gem let her go. 

 

Backing away, panting deep breaths, Jasper regarded her enemy: her eyes took in the purple skin, the white hair, the blue eyes, a white star where a pink diamond would have been on her uniform. Jasper glowered. Something sharp and indignant swelled inside her at the sight of this Gem. “You’re from Prime….”

 

Under her soaking hair, the Amethyst stared at her in what looked like a moment of sympathy. This was, after all, another Earth Quartz, a Gem made from the planet’s dirt, just like her. But it melted into resolve. “They never should have made a second Kindergarten,” she said with a shake of her head. Was she talking to Jasper? To the Crystal Gems around her? Or herself? “We honestly didn’t think they would…but they did, so we _have_ to do this.”

 

Jasper growled in raw fury and rushed at her foe “Traitor!”

  

 

 

Carnelian jumped out of the way just in time to avoid being hit by the butt-end of a Chrysolite’s now-useless blaster. Tucking into her spin dash, she darted along the waterlogged combat zone, trying to avoid crashing into the overwhelmed Jaspers who struggled against their attackers. But then a hard foot connected with her, punting her into the air like a ball. She unrolled, gasping in fright when she saw how high she had been kicked, and unceremoniously crashed back down to the wet ground with a messy splash. 

 

The Amethyst who had kicked Carnelian took a look at her surroundings, bemused. She scratched the back of her head, taking it all in. “Stars, 2xB,” she exclaimed to the Amethyst next to her, “this place is a dump! Wow! And the Peridots had the gall to nitpick some of the holes at Prime. Geez, look at this!”

 

2xB snickered but ribbed her light-heartedly. “C’mon, this doesn’t make you even a little homesick, 9xA?”

 

The other Amethyst cracked a smile that didn’t match the mayhem surrounding her. “Okay, yeah, maybe a little,” she admitted.

 

Carnelian held her head in her hands for a minute, trying to get the valley to stop spinning so wildly. Amethyst 2xB frowned and displayed her scimitar from the lavender gemstone in her right hand. Stepping up behind Carnelian, she kicked the Beta back down into the mud, and held her in place with her boot. “You surrender?” she inquired. Carnelian gripped the big boot on top of her chest, trying to wrestle it off of her, even going so far as to bite it, but to no avail. The Amethyst simply shook her head and muttered, “Sorry, squirt.” With a yell, she slashed down with her weapon. 

 

Only to hit the helmet of a Jasper that dived between them. Carnelian up to see Criss-Cross, the Jasper with the x-shaped stripe on the right side of her face, grab Amethyst 2xB by her shoulders and push her off of the other Beta. Criss-Cross’s helmet lacked the battering ram of their platoon leader’s, so she tried instead to wrestle their adversary in an effort to get a clear attack at her gemstone, her most vulnerable point. The two Earth Quartzes were evenly matched, hands locked in combat, ankle deep in mud as each tried to shove the other over. The Amethyst chuckled, enjoying the fight. “I like the stripes,” she told Criss-Cross in an attempt to get her to lower her guard. It wouldn’t work, however. Criss-Cross doubled-down in her effort, pushing the Amethyst back deeper and deeper into the sludge. However, in both of their minds they shared the same thought: perhaps, in a better world, they might have made great allies. 

 

Carnelian shouted, “Look out!”

 

But Criss-Cross did not notice how Amethyst 9xA had snuck up behind her until she struck the exposed gemstone on the Jasper’s back with a closed fist. The Beta Quartz fell to the ground, and her form flickered like static in the rain, jolting erratically as she tried to hold herself together. Her gemstone must have had a hairline fracture from the impact. Brittle. That was what the Peridots had called them. Criss-Cross gritted her teeth and shook her head, muttering, “No, not now….” Her sisters needed her. She couldn’t lose her form.

 

Amethyst 9xA knelt down next to her, a mixture of admiration and distress etched into her wet features. She put a hand on the Jasper’s chest warmly. “You got a good core in here. Rose Quartz could heal you,” she promised. “I could take you to her, let her talk to you. So you’ll understand. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

 

Criss-Cross’s form continued to flicker, and she remembered Tumbled Peach Agate’s words from that day. Even off color sediment was better than a traitor. And it would be lucky if she were to die fighting in the service of her Diamond. Her life was Pink Diamond’s to give. So Criss-Cross narrowed her eyes and hissed, “I’ll never betray my colony or my Diamond. Shatter me, you monsters!”

 

Summoning her club, Carnelian tried to rush in and help, but before she could reach her Beta sister, Amethyst 9xA resignedly punched the Jasper’s gemstone again, cracking it, making her form disappear altogether. Seeing the Crystal Gem reach down to pick up the gemstone, Carnelian struck her arm with her club with fiery ardor. “Leave her alone!” she screamed, tears mixing with the rain running down her face. She thrashed the Amethyst in the ribs with newfound strength, knocking the wind out of her. “Get outta here! Get out!” When Amethyst 2xB took a swing at her with her scimitar, Carnelian ducked, leapt up, and smashed her club in her face. While she continued to fight off the Quartzes, Carnelian wished feverishly that she was bigger, that she was a normal-sized soldier, that she could protect the others the way they protected her.

 

 

 

Skinny was dazed, trying to coordinate herself through the middle of the battlefield. Everywhere she looked, the whole place was a maelstrom of destruction. This was her home: a never-ending war zone. It had been that way when she first climbed out of her hole, and it remained that way now. Jaspers were poofing left and right, Crystal Gems seemingly everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and it felt like Skinny couldn’t go five steps without kicking over a gemstone that had been submerged in the ankle-deep water on the ground. She gripped her spear like a lifeline, skewering a Beryl who had charged at her. From somewhere behind her, making it through the screams and sounds of her own harsh breathing, she heard someone call out, “Get the technicians! If they don’t have Kindergarteners, they can’t make more soldiers!” 

 

When something green rushed by her, it clicked Skinny’s mind that the Crystal Gems were going to target the Peridots, that the Obsidian that was on their tail was going to kidnap or shatter them. She had to protect them; they were annoying, impolite, and insensitive, but they were still on her side, and they were practically defenseless. She couldn’t just leave them to fend for themselves.

 

With a running start and a grunt of effort, she launched her spear in the air, where it sailed before driving into the Obsidian’s left leg like a bullseye. The Crystal Gem bit down on her tongue hard and fell to her knees in the mud with a yelp, giving the Peridots enough time to scamper away. At least they would probably be okay, now that the scrawny Jasper had grabbed the rebels’ attention away from them. Skinny knew they would probably find some holes to climb into and hide, since the warp pad had no doubt been temporarily deactivated, as it always was anytime the rebels attacked; after all, if the Kindergarten fell, Homeworld couldn’t risk the Crystal Gems gaining entrance to the other bases accessible by the warp pads.

 

Skinny ran towards the Obsidian to reclaim her spear, but suddenly a bulky form dropped out of the air with a heavy splash of water and sand right in her line of vision, and Skinny had no moment to react before she was viciously backhanded by a vigorous blow, sending her crashing to the ground. 

 

“Ah, I love the smell of dissipating Homeworld Gems in the morning.”

 

Rubbing her bruised cheek and wiping the mud from her eyes while she scrambled to stand back up, Skinny gasped when her yellow eyes laid upon the Gem who had knocked her down, recognizing her wa another Quartz; and not just any other type of Quartz, but a Jasper specifically. She was not of their cut, however. She wasn’t Beta. Her skin was the warm color of umber and russet, with varying light and dark brown scale-like bands across her body, so unlike the red stripes of the Beta Jaspers. Her six-faceted gemstone glistened on her chest, and she wiped her white wet hair away from her eyes, glancing over her shoulder at her teammate. “Are you okay, Snowflake?”

 

The Obsidian grumbled when she pulled Skinny’s spear out of her leg, cringing but nevertheless holding her form together just fine. “Well, I’ve certainly had better days, Biggs. But I’ll live.”

 

“Where’s Crazy Lace?”

 

“Last I saw her, she was holding off some big brute,” answered Snowflake Obsidian. Then with a guilty shrug, she added, “No offense.”

 

Biggs chortled, a full laugh from the immense build of her chest. She wasn’t an Earth-made Quartz, like the peachy Rose Quartzes, the purple Amethysts, or the red-banded Jaspers. She had come to the planet originally from Homeworld before defecting to the Crystal Gems. “None taken. Go find her. Bismuth said they’re starting to regroup, we’ll need to split soon. We’ll need to cover. But first we sh- oof!” She reached up a hand and massaged her jaw where Skinny had clocked her while she had been distracted. A smile crossed her lips, but her eyes lit up in rage and she leveled them at the scrawny Jasper that had challenged her. “Seriously?! Okay, if that’s how you want it.” Skinny could not duck out of the way in time to avoid being punched hard by Biggs in the gut, and then elbowed sharply in the back, sending her back face-first into the water.

 

Skinny groaned, rolling over on her back to cough up some of the muddy water she’d ingested. She wrapped her hands over her stomach, feeling like she’d just been struck by the force of an injector drill. But when she tried standing up, Biggs held her down with a boot on her chest, heel dangerously close to the gemstone on her navel. “You know,” said Biggs, “I almost feel sorry for you. Even if Homeworld _did_ win this war, do you seriously think you would have a place in their world? Do you even know what kind of Gems the Diamonds are? You were lucky they made you when they did, when they were so _desperate_.” Her features softened somewhat, betraying vulnerability. “You should have joined us. We would have treated you like a friend.”

 

Biting her bottom lip, Skinny tried to wrench Biggs’s boot off her chest, to no avail. Failing that, she forced herself to crack a dry smile. “You understand how hard it is for me to believe that, when my first memories are of you guys trying to kill me, right?”

 

The other Jasper gave her a stare that might have hinted at pity or regret, but then her features hardened with resolve. Biggs sighed and summoned her double-sided axe from her gemstone. “It’s nothing personal. It’s for the greater good,” she said, raising her weapon above her head. Skinny’s smile faded, and terror froze her plasma blood when she realized Biggs was going to cleave her axe down on her gem. 

 

She was going to die. 

 

Or she would have if a Crazy Lace Agate hadn’t careened through the air and collided into Biggs like a cannonball out of the blue, knocking them both down. Acting on the type of instinct only pure panic could bring, emboldened to move only because fear pumped through her limbs, Skinny scuttled madly away. It was too much, it was all too much. She knew she was a soldier, she knew she had to fight, but she didn’t want to die! She didn’t even look back over her shoulder to see Jasper rhino-charging at the Crazy Lace Agate and Biggs Jasper, and it barely registered to her when four giant cross-Gem fusions manifested to fight the Betas, giving the signal for the other Crystal Gems to escape. Everywhere Skinny looked, there was war and mayhem. It was inescapable.

 

 

 

 

Peridot 6xL smiled when she announced, “We’ve finally received clearance from Yellow Diamond that the warp pad has been authorized for reactivation.” The other technicians were ecstatic to hear the news, for that meant the Beta Kindergarten had been declared safe enough to reestablish contact with the higher ups. Tumbled Peach Agate 7xE was more than pleased at this revelation too. She had been lucky to have gotten out of that battle by the skin of her teeth; Agates like her were not made to fight, they were made to make others fight, they were only fighters of a last resort; and with each onslaught she was worried she would inevitably be forced to face against the rebel forces herself. She longed more than ever to be transferred out of the cesspool that was Beta. Off of Earth, period. But for now, this was her lot in life. It was what Pink Diamond wanted.

 

She collected herself, looking down at her tablet again to get her information straight. She had to complete the log on the battle. 

 

The tactics of the Crystal Gems were so difficult to pin down, even after centuries of fighting the traitors. It was part of what made the rebellion so laborious to squash. After the fusions appeared, it seemed as though all of the other Crystal Gems had dispersed, fleeing the canyons like their lives depended on it, as they most certainly did. The Beta Quartzes had scored a few victories. The Agates sent a few squadrons to chase the rebels down, but inevitably they always lost sight of them. Rose Quartz’s Gems knew the Earth better than they did, somehow, it was like they knew every escape route imaginable. Even with all of Homeworld’s advance equipment, they couldn’t follow them, something always went awry when they tried. It was like Rose Quartz controlled nature itself.

 

Tumbled Peach Agate had thought the Quartzes couldn’t possibly look more pathetic than they had when she had called them to attention in the heavy rain; she had been wrong. Seeing them now in the aftermath of the battle, standing at attention after she called them into formation, to see who could be accounted for, she could hardly imagine a more miserable looking lot. Before her stood shellshocked soldiers, faces opening baring hurt, loss, pain, and agony. Agate sighed and shook her head. She knew they were undoubtedly upset from what had just occurred.

 

But now was not the time for them to indulge feelings of misery. “Stop sniveling!” she snapped, resuming the cold air of detachment she had been taught to when disciplining her Quartzes. “You let the Crystal Gems escape again! How could you have possibly lost them? Do you expect me to believe they just disappeared into thin air?!” No Beta had an answer to give. None even tried. Carnelian was too preoccupied with trying to stop her crying. Skinny practically hyperventilated from where she stood, hardly able to keep standing on her spindly legs from the way her knees knocked together. Jasper sucked in her bottom lip to keep it from quivering, trying her hardest to be more like a good soldier.

 

The frustrations building in Tumbled Peach Agate spilled as she them took out on her soldiers, the only acceptable way she knew how. “I said stop whimpering, you pathetic sacks of sand! You’ve handled worse than this. Let this be a lesson to you: remain vigilant! How did none of them notice the rebel Gems before they attacked?” She got up in the face of Cleft and leveled the question again, but the Jasper’s feline-like face was too contorted in its attempt to stop showing sadness that she couldn’t answer. Tumbled Peach Agate turned on Red Brows. “How could you possibly be so dim-witted?” This time to Armband, “You vastly outnumbered them!” Then to Two-Tone, “You stupid brutes!” To Split, “You deserve this loss!” To Palmstone, “You weren’t paying attention!” To Orange Hands, “You’ve embarrassed Pink Diamond!” To Starstripe, “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll make you stop!” 

 

She stomped through the mud, delivering firm smacks on the cheeks to the Jaspers who would not stop weeping. “You’re an army, start acting like it! If you want to be upset, get angry at the rebels. Put your feelings to actual use.” Finally she was able to get them to cease with their tears, although the torrent of their grief was only being held back by the thinest of guards. For now, she would take it. Tumbled Peach Agate knew she could not let the Quartzes fall apart after a battle, even a messy one like this had been. Brutes controlled by their emotions quickly lost discipline. She had to restrain them. Let them release their frustrations later onto the traitors the next time Rose Quartz attacked. “Remember, you were designed to take this. Every piece of advance technological engineering went into making you remorseless fighting machines. You are soldiers. From the injector to the recycler, you are a soldier for life. This is what you were made for.”


	6. Pink Diamond's Spire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the Crystal Gems successfully win a battle at Pink Diamond's spire in the mountains, over a hundred Amethysts from Prime are reported missing-in-action. Jasper and Skinny are sent to retrieve them. Skinny, feeling unsure of herself after what happened during the previous raid at Beta, has a crisis of confidence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who left kudos on the previous chapter. If you enjoy this chapter, please consider leaving a comment. I would like to keep up this momentum, though only if there is interest.

They had never seen trees so tall in their lives before. Granted, they had not seen anywhere near all of the organic life on the planet, in fact they had seen very little still outside of their Kindergarten, but they could not imagine how there could be any trees taller than the ones in the forest on the mountain they were walking through at that moment. All grown naturally on Earth, not created by Gem hands. And they were so thick they almost choked out the light that managed to shine beams between their massive canopies, making the woods darker than they otherwise should have been, considering the time of day. Everything was green and lush, so radically the opposite of the Beta Kindergarten that Skinny could hardly believe both places were on the same planet. Earth was wild, as every Gem from Homeworld liked to remind them. 

 

She might have taken more time to appreciate the scenery if she hadn’t been reminded why she and her sororal twin were there walking through miles of foliage in the first place, throwing glances over their shoulders from time to time at the slightest sound in case someone was waiting to ambush them. “So do you think they’re even still alive?” she asked Jasper, accepting her offered hand to help pull her over a massive fallen log. 

 

“The Amethysts?” asked Jasper. Over one-hundred Amethysts from the Prime Kindergarten had lost communication with their superiors while on their mission to thwart the Crystal Gems from taking over one of Pink Diamond’s spires. The warp pad nearest to their location had been completely deactivated by the rebels, and with transmissions also cut off, the Prime Quartzes were declared by their commanding officer as officially missing in action. With the other soldiers from the first Kindergarten dispersed thinly and occupied throughout the various facets, a request came from the Moon Base, from Pink Diamond herself, to send a couple of scouts from Beta to see why communication had been suspended, to inquire whether the Amethysts were okay or if the Crystal Gems had completely taken over the area and wiped them out. 

 

It didn’t cross Jasper’s mind to examine how slightly off this mission felt. If she had been a Gem predisposed to question the will of her Diamond, she might have wondered why Pink Diamond would send two Gems alone into what was most assuredly considered Crystal Gem territory by this point, two Betas off to face what a whole platoon of Primes failed to conquer. But such thoughts did not plague her at that moment, because she knew better than to assume that Pink Diamond would ever lead them into danger, or that she might have known exactly why events had transpired as they had between the rebels and the army from Prime. All Jasper cared about now was the task at hand.

 

“Yeah,” Skinny answered, rubbing her right arm and evading the enormous rock in their path. Skinny had a feeling that Jasper honestly would have preferred to be sent on the mission with Carnelian, Cleft, Missing Tooth, and the rest of their platoon to guard the Ziggurat, after intelligence gathered by Yellow Diamond had reported of a rebel attack that might occur there soon. But after learning that Pink Diamond had expressly called for this mission, her mountain of a sister had volunteered immediately. Skinny couldn’t just let her go off on her own, and offered to be backup. 

 

So now they found themselves combing through a forest, trying to reach the site of the spire. A part of Skinny felt a pang of hurt and jealousy that Pink Diamond would send scouts to find a platoon of Primes, and yet none of them had been allowed to send anyone to look for the eighteen Jaspers that had been declared missing since their expedition to the ice caverns, to even find out if _they_ were still alive; Right Eye, Headband, and the others, no one at Beta still had any idea what had become of them. Skinny wanted to think it was just about simple numbers, that a hundred Quartzes lost was obviously a bigger hit to take than eighteen, and not the needling fear that the Amethysts were worth much more than the Jaspers, or at least the Jaspers from Beta, to Homeworld. “What are the odds that when we get there, we’ll just find a big pile of cracked gemstones and be walking into another trap?”

 

Dark eyebrows bridged at the top of Jasper’s gemstone, and the lines under her eyes creased. She felt pent-up anger beginning to boil in her chest as she said darkly, “I’d be more worried that the whole battalion has defected to the rebels.” It had felt good to crack that Amethyst during the last raid; some dark part of her even wished she had shattered her instead outright, instead of handing her gemstone over to her senior instructor with the others; shattering was what traitors deserved. How dare those Amethysts betray their Diamond, the creator? Jasper was beginning to understand that any soldier who defied the chain of command were not soldiers at all. One needed not look further than Rose Quartz to show the dangers of soldiers who lacked the discipline to remain loyal to their superiors; such Gems needed to be eliminated.

 

The pang in Skinny’s gut stung more, and she sighed, trying to suppress it. That realization had shaken them all. Of course they’d heard from the Agates that some Amethysts had turned against their Diamond, following in the footsteps of Rose Quartz. But hearing about it and then seeing the reality of it were vastly different things. To suddenly be threatened by Gems who were like them, who had also been made from this planet, from this dirt, it felt like a much worse betrayal than that committed by the other Crystal Gems. She tried to assure Jasper, “You don’t know that they defected.” They could not start getting paranoid. 

 

Jasper gave her a look, but then conceded, “Hmph. I guess not. But better to prepare for the worst.”

 

“Hmmm,” Skinny hummed, wrapping her arms in front of her gut. Either they were probably going to encounter a heap of shards or a disloyal platoon of purple renegades as soon as they arrived. Those were the two scenarios they could foresee. So either way, they didn’t hold much hope that they were going to find good news once they reached the spire. 

 

There came a loud * _snap_ * over their heads, and Skinny instinctively manifested her spear from the oval gemstone on her belly, preparing for a Crystal Gem to drop down and strike. But instead, a large hawk swooped down and flew passed them to land in another tree far away from the two Jaspers. Skinny let out the breath she had been holding and dissolved her weapon. She was surprised by how shaken her nerves had been by that. Worse still, Jasper had noticed. 

 

“Heh-heh! Don’t tell me you were _scared_ of that thing?” she said with a goading grin, slapping Skinny on the back, practically shoving her to the ground with the impact if she hadn’t caught her footing in time to prevent it. 

 

Rolling her eyes, Skinny brushed her fringe from her eyes and responded a little defensively, “Of that? No, of course not. Pfft.” It was not the bird that was the problem. Nine times out of ten, any movement from the trees was caused by some stupid animal, or by the wind blowing through the canopies; but the one other time…. It was the fear of not knowing if the next rustle was the precursor to another battle that had Skinny twitching. There was no way she would let her sister know about that though. 

 

“Yeah, right,” Jasper said, still chuckling, and resumed walking forward. But she didn’t take more than ten steps over a pile of dead leaves and pine needles, when all of a sudden a cord swiftly snagged around her ankle, and yanked her up in the air as the cord jerked her up to where rope was snared taut in one of the branches high in a tree. However, the rope could not hold her weight, and after a moment of her helplessly dangling, the thick branch cracked, and Jasper crashed back to the forest floor with a heavy thud, scaring off any other animals that might have been nearby. 

 

Skinny ran over and unwrapped the line from her ankle while Jasper picked herself up, irritation visible across her face. “It doesn’t look like a trap laid for Gems,” observed Skinny, examining the rope between her fingers and looking at the branch it had been tied to. If the Crystal Gems had set that snare, it would have been able to handle the weight of a Quartz soldier surely; their enemies were many things, but they certainly were not incompetent. “Organics?” she asked.

 

“Humans,” asserted Jasper, brushing dust from her legs. The Crystal Gems sometimes used the dominant Earth species as weapons in their war, the Betas had seen this themselves. Why the rebellion would want to recruit the soft, flabby, weak creatures, they’d never understood. Jasper considered it dishonorable on Rose Quartz’s part. She had no love for these weird Earth creatures, but they belonged among their tribes, not to be used as cannon fodder against Quartz soldiers so the Crystal Gems could create diversions. 

 

Since Jasper was unharmed by the experience, Skinny allowed herself a wry grin and said, “That was pretty funny, though.”

 

“Shut up, brat.” But Skinny didn’t miss the smile on the corner of Jasper’s mouth, and she reached up to pluck some dead leaves out of her sister’s long hair. 

 

They got to their destination at Pink Diamond’s spire without any further difficulties. To the Homeworld Gems who had been on Earth for hundreds and hundreds of years since the colony was founded, this monument did not look as impressive as the one the Diamonds had ordered erected in the ocean and the one for the sky, but it was still a sight to behold for Quartzes who had not seen anything like it in their short lives. It had been built into the edge of a cliff’s drop-off. Cylinder in shape, the top third of the pink tower sat on the crown of the cliff, and the remainder of it hand been constructed into the face of the majestic pale rock. Stairs from the dome on the head of the tower spiraled down until they abruptly stopped in the middle, leading nowhere. The spire seemed incomplete, like the builders had had to stop in the middle of development, as was most likely the case. Hibiscus flowers were chiseled into the crystalline stone that made up the outside, signifying along with the coloring that this one had been made under Pink Diamond’s guidance. But there were no Crystal Gems outside guarding it; in fact, there appeared to be no rebels anywhere near the vicinity. Or any Prime Quartzes for that matter. 

 

Jasper didn’t like it. She had been expecting at least a few rebels, a handful left behind to at least guard their prize, she had come prepared to fight for this monument back. Were they so confident that Homeworld would write it off simply because they had disabled the warp pad. Fools. If Pink Diamond had sent them with a larger team, they could easily swipe back her Mountain Spire from the incompetent clutches of Rose Quartz, and they could have brought along some technicians to fix the warp pad, ensuring victory. However, their mission wasn’t one of reclaiming lost monuments, just to locate and return with the missing Amethysts of Facet 5. Oh well. She could always hope a fight waited for them in the spire.

 

“I guess we should check inside,” suggested Skinny, and the two Jaspers walked into the large opened doorway, shaped to look like the pedals of a hibiscus flower, summoning their weapons in preparation for whatever was going to be waiting for them.

 

The sunlight came through the many windows, lighting up the interior to show the tower had been trashed in the fight to claim it. Whatever Pink Diamond had built the spire for, she would have to reconstruct it after the war was won. The floors were torn up in various places, tiles thrown everywhere, the walls were cracked, multiple holes lined the ceiling like someone had stomped through them. It was a complete mess. Some parts of its original beauty remained, however. The murals that decorated the walls could still be seen fairly well as they walked along the hallway. They showed what looked to be the story of Pink Diamond arriving and beginning her colonies on Earth: one side had Pink Diamond holding the planet and its moon in her hands, followed by ships landing and delivering the first Homeworld Gems serving in her honor; on the other side, Yellow Diamond stood next to Pink Diamond while she pointed to an empty pink and purple mountainside; yet another section of the wall had the benevolent, loving Pink Diamond with her arms opened, surrounded by many pink and purple Quartzes who venerated her. The Prime Kindergarten. This spire must have been a late construction, perhaps started just before the rebellion.

 

The Jaspers kept walking until they reached two sets of stairs, one leading up and the other down, with a mural of the Diamond Authority symbol displayed in the space between them. Jasper ran her hand over the Pink Diamond insignia, which had been smashed and caved in by a Crystal Gem. On the floor below it laid crumbled a large piece of pink fabric. Handing her spear to Jasper, Skinny reached down and picked it up. Spreading it out wide revealed it was in fact a flag: vines of thorns crossed in front of a diamond pattern, and a rose-petaled shield adorned the center. Jasper’s lip curled in a flare of fury. “Rose….”

 

All of a sudden, they heard a loud series of thumps that seemed to vibrate from below, startling them. Skinny grabbed her spear again, tightly clasping it in her hands. “The Crystal Gems are still here?” They moved away from the stairs, but since they were not looking where they were going, Jasper did not see the wire lining just above the ground of the giant pentagonal doorway they were stepping into until she snapped it under her boot, triggering a giant slab from the ceiling to come flying down at them. They had only a moment to notice the slab was encrusted with sharpened stone spikes before they hit the floor. There was barely an inch’s width of space between the slab and their backs, but it swooshed past them and crashed instead into the wall behind them, ruining the mural on it. 

 

Skinny raised a hand to her temple, trying to steady her breath as they stood up, Jasper observing, “They’ve probably laid traps in the whole spire.” Was that why the Crystal Gems felt confident in abandoning their prize? How stupid. Did they really believe such amateurish traps would stop trained Quartz soldiers? What sort of tactic was that supposed to be? Rose Quartz was supposed to be a brilliant mastermind, able to hold off the power of Pink Diamond for centuries, but this? This was lazy.

 

“I’m sure they also heard all of that noise,” said Skinny uneasily, picking up her spear from the floor. It was just like it was at the ice caverns, they’d stepped right into a trap that had been set for them; at least this time it wasn’t a bomb. She knew if Tumbled Peach Agate was there with them, she would have fiercely berated them for their stupidity, as she had that night when they came back. But the grimace that marred her features was not from the fear of chastisement from their superior officer. Skinny remembered how the snare in the snow-covered mountains detonated the bomb, crumbling the ground under those Jaspers’ feet, sending them falling into the deep darkness of the ravine.

 

She remembered the look of fear on Right Eye’s face when the icicle she’d been holding snapped, and how she’d failed to catch her in time to save her from plummeting down with the others.

 

Skinny shook her head, trying to elude the memories; now was not the time for this, she told herself. She had to remember her discipline and remain vigilant. At any second, the Crystal Gems would start popping out of the walls, climbing out from the floor, dropping down from the ceiling, all ready to maim them, crack them, and shatter them. Just like at Beta. There would be too many, they weren’t prepared for such quick and brutal assaults. She and her twin wouldn’t be able to hold them off, this was too much. The Crystal Gems were going to kill them. Skinny wouldn’t be able to stop them.

 

She couldn’t catch her breath, and in her panic she stumbled over a tile that had been loosened from the floor in another wide doorway, revealing another trap her clumsiness had activated. She tripped and fell on her back, dropping her spear again, dematerializing it. The thick, crystalline door, large enough for a Diamond, came sliding down fast, and Skinny realized from where she had fallen, it was going to crush her in half. She froze, mouth agape in a mute shout of terror; suddenly it wasn’t a door coming down on her, but the sharp end of an axe. She couldn’t move, not even to save herself. All she could do was feebly throw her arms over her navel, protecting her brittle gemstone, preparing for the worst….

 

…Which never came. With a noisy * _clunk_ * the bottom of the massive door hit the top of Jasper’s helmet. Her sister’s shoulders shook under the strain of holding up the heavy door, even when she put her muscular arm-power into it. She glared at Skinny from behind her visor, eyes wide and teeth bared in exasperation. “Move!” she shouted. “I can’t hold this all day!” But Skinny did not budge at first, still lying on the ground, fingers moving on their own to gingerly feel that the gem on her belly was still intact; she wasn’t dead, she was still here. Jasper growled, and her voice raised to a scream in anger. “What’s the matter with you?! Get up!” 

 

That got Skinny to jostle from her shock long enough to scramble to her feet and duck out into the hallway, letting Jasper drop her hold on the door, which slammed down after, kicking up dust and rubble. Jasper glowered at her Beta sister, prepared to demand what had just happened, but she was surprised to see Skinny standing there, one hand against the wall, hyperventilating. Her thin frame quivered, shivering to the touch, she had completely lost the cool and affable demeanor she always seemed to carry. Everything about this new image was unnerving. 

 

“Jasper?” she asked, but her lanky twin did not move, she still stood there, trying to catch the breath she didn’t even need; it made no sense, Gems did not require air, so why couldn’t she collect herself? Jasper tried instead to approach with the nickname Carnelian had given her, hoping this would jostle her back to reality. “Hey Skinny, what is this ab-” When she put a hand on Skinny’s slim shoulder, the scrawny Jasper recoiled violently. 

 

“I-I’m not strong enough!” Skinny abruptly screamed and darted down the hallway in a sprint.

 

“Stop! What are you doing?!” Jasper called out, following behind her. She tried to keep an eye on Skinny, but she stumbled and tripped over jutting pieces of debris that were strewn across the floor, and lost sight of her when she ran down the stairs. What in the world was she thinking? Was she thinking at all? Frustration mixed with concern as Jasper picked herself back up and rushed after her down the staircase, leaping down the steps in three bounds; it was no doubt leading to the part of the tower that had been built into the mountain face, a dark area that looked more like a fortress than anything as majestic as a monument. It was much dimmer down there, but Jasper did not have any difficulty in seeing where she was going, as she looked for another pair of yellow eyes that would be glowing in the dark like hers. 

 

She was prepared to journey all the way to the bottom of the spire, but when she turned a sharp corner she almost collided into Skinny, who was sitting on the floor, back against the wall, her spindly knees drawn up to her chest. One hand gripped her light hair tightly while the other wrapped over her face. Her phosphorescent eyes were as wide as saucers, her pupils like pinpoints, and tears fell freely unchecked down her face. Jasper found herself practically at a loss for words. She’d never seen her twin act like this before, especially never during a mission. Skinny could always be counted on to keep composure during even the most stressful of circumstances, she was often the glue that held the others together; whereas other Jaspers might be overwhelmed by their circumstances, Skinny kept her cool, she didn’t allow herself to be affected by seemingly anything thrown at her. It was one reason Jasper relied on her so much. Even if she herself couldn’t at all times keep a leveled head, she could always depend on Skinny to. 

 

Kneeling down next to her, Jasper grabbed Skinny’s slim shoulders as gently as she was capable with her big hands. “What’s wrong?” she asked again, more softly this time. 

 

She could barely hear Skinny’s voice when she spoke through the fingers splayed over her face. “That Jasper was going to c-cut my gem in half,” she stuttered, drawing more into herself, so firmly aware of just how fragile the gemstone on her belly was. “I c-couldn’t…stop her….I’m not like you, I’m n-not strong enough….I’ll n-never be s-strong enough….” And what was a Jasper without strength? Worthless. 

 

Jasper gripped her shoulders more tightly. “The Crystal Gems have tried to kill us plenty of times before that. What makes this time any different?” she asked, which certainly did not help matters, only making Skinny shake harder. She couldn’t understand why this brush with death would throw her off so much. Maybe Skinny wasn’t as composed and levelheaded as Jasper believed she was. Maybe things _did_ affect her. How could they not? Skinny was the most off color of Beta, the one who looked the least like what a Jasper should. She wasn’t muscular, broad-shouldered, or intimidating. How could Jasper continue to overlook that? 

 

Faced with the reality that her sister _did_ have such visible imperfections, that she simply could not do the things she herself could, that all of the other Jaspers could, Jasper did not know how to feel right then. On some level, she wanted to plead with Skinny, to force her to admit she _could_ step up, she _could_ do the things she could, that it was only her fear holding her back. Skinny was still a Jasper. She was still a soldier. She was still Pink Diamond’s. She could still do her duty.

 

But Jasper also knew if she hadn’t thrown the Crazy Lace Agate at that Biggs Jasper, the renegade Quartz would have cleaved her axe right through Skinny’s midsection, and her gemstone would have been too brittle to withstand such a strike. Her twin was sleek and agile, and none of them at Beta was quicker with a spear in her hands, but raw strength was not something Skinny had been made with when she had popped out of the ground; she would not have been able to win against that Crystal Gem in a fight of strength, and when it came to Quartz soldiers, strength is what mattered. What if, in the next battle, a rebel did manage to shatter her gemstone?

 

Jasper did not want to admit how much the thought of losing Skinny worried her. They had come out of the same row. Skinny’s had been the hole closest to her own. Skinny was the first sister her eyes laid upon when she had been born that chaotic day, the first sister she had saved from the Crystal Gems, the first sister she had felt affection and love toward. She certainly didn’t have the words to describe what she was feeling right then, so blatantly aware of how vulnerable Skinny was. She didn’t want to think about the implications of what it meant to be so off color. And as long as Skinny could still perform her duties as a soldier, if she could do what she was programmed to do, Jasper would never have to think about it.

 

So she instead pulled Skinny in close and embraced her, wrapping her arms around her back completely. “You can be strong enough,” she tried to assure her. “You _need_ to be strong for our Diamond, and our colony.”

 

Caught off-guard by the sudden clasp, Skinny let the words comfort her, knowing how vulnerable Jasper had allowed herself to become in order to say them. After a few minutes, she felt herself calming down, her breathing coming back under control, syncing with the Gem holding her in her arms. She stopped shaking, then buried her face in Jasper’s hair and sighed soothingly. The war was getting to her. The constant threat of being destroyed had worn down her resolve. But her sisters and her Diamond needed her to survive, to help win their planet back. Like all of the Betas, she was made to fight, even if her form didn’t support it. Fighting was what she would have to do. 

 

After a few minutes of enjoying the closeness and affection, Skinny finally pulled back and Jasper slapped one of her shoulders warmly. “C’mon,” her mountainous twin said with a grin, “Jaspers don’t give up! Jaspers keep going, until we get what we want!”

 

Skinny laughed in spite of herself, wiping the wetness from her face with the heel of her palm. “You sound so schmaltzy when you say that, y’know?” That was the Skinny that Jasper wanted to see again. Things could finally go back to normal now.

 

Another sequences of thumps interrupted their intimate moment, loud banging noises coming from the under floor below them alerted them again that they were not alone here at Pink Diamond’s spire. They both stood up and backed away for a second, staring at the floor, before Jasper considered, “What is their trick? They must know we’re here, why not just come out and attack us?” Skinny shrugged, but both of them summoned their weapons again. Jasper turned to her sister and, with hesitation in her voice, asked, “Can you handle this?”

 

It had never been a question before. Skinny hoped it would never have to be asked of her again. She was a Jasper. She was a soldier. She _could_ handle this. “Yeah.”

 

They followed the noise further downstairs until they reached a giant, closed-off pit at the bottom of the tower. None of this was making sense to them, but the thumps kept vibrating from the top of the impenetrably thick cover. Jasper ran her hands across it and determined not even her helmet could penetration through its dense design. Spotting a nearby control panel on the wall, Skinny activated it to find the settings necessary to open the door. Feeling surer of herself, she scanned her hand and her eyes flashed with streams of data as it read her programming. The computers located the code to ensure she was one of Pink Diamond’s Gems, the code that marked her as belonging to the creator of the spire, and it opened to her command.

 

Once the door on the floor opened, Jasper narrowed her eyes in a flash of anger and prepared to charge directly at the bulky forms of Gems who immediately jumped out at the chance at freedom. Her mind raced back to the most recent raid on her Kindergarten as her eyes spotted the familiar: the purple skin, the long mane of hair, the blue eyes. One of them, with a gemstone on her right hip, threw up her hands defensively when she saw Jasper prepared to charge at them. “Whoa there, big girl!” she exclaimed, balling her fists to fight if she had to. But when her eyes fell upon the Pink Diamond emblem, the Amethyst loosened up again and smiled. “Oh wow, you’re one of ours! Everyone, they’re on our side!” 

 

Jasper pulled back. She and Skinny observed the Amethysts while the three from Prime that climbed out of the pit studied them back. A quick glance in the hole revealed there were dozens upon dozens of Amethysts crammed into the small, compact space. All of them wearing Pink Diamond’s standard uniform. All of the missing soldiers from Prime, alive and accounted for. How in the world had they gotten in there? Had the rebels put them there? Why had the Crystal Gems left them behind? Wasn’t it typically Rose Quartz’s style to take them back to her home base, as prisoners-of-war, to stick them in bubbles forever? Now the gaping holes in the mission really were noticeable, and none of it was making much sense. But Jasper didn’t question these things. It wasn’t her place to question them. She and Skinny had succeeded, they had fulfilled their Diamond’s mission, a much-needed achievement after the failures they had experienced of late.

 

An Amethyst with a gemstone on her left shoulder, whose white hair had such an excess of iron that a bundle of it curled over her right shoulder, extended a hand to the Jaspers. “I’m Amethyst: Facet 5 Cut-8xJ. And stars, are we happy to see you!”


	7. Prime Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After having been rescued by Jasper and Skinny, the Amethysts from Prime are taken back to Beta to await return to duty. There, they mingle with the other soldiers, and the two armies from Earth get to know each other better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to those who left comments/kudos, they keep this flowing. If you like this chapter, please consider leaving a comment.

“Oh, it’s so red here!” Amethyst 8xG raised her gem-embedded right hand up to shield her eyes from the blinding sun to get a better look at the Beta Kindergarten. The other Amethysts seemed equally curious and excited about the place, running up to the walls of the curved canyons to touch the sandstone and peek into the oddly-shaped holes. The Jaspers in return regarded them with a mixture of awe and embarrassment. Apart from the few rebel Amethysts they fought who were fighting for the Crystal Gems, this was the first time they had come up close to Homeworld’s other Earth Army.

 

When Jasper and Skinny had brought Amethyst 8xJ’s platoon back to Beta with them, it had created a storm, especially since Carnelian, Cleft, and their group had come back from the Ziggurat; their news paled in comparison to the arrival of the Prime Quartzes, since the Ziggurat had proved to everyone’s irritation to be nothing more than a diversion, in other words a complete waste of time. At first the Tumbled Peach Agates had taken the Amethysts away to a secluded part of the desert, just outside of the Kindergarten, as part of an interrogation. “Standard military protocol,” Tumbled Peach Agate 7xE had said flippantly. Formalities dictated that any Gem who had been declared missing-in-action had to go through a cross-examination, just in case they had secretly gone renegade during their time away and now only returned to spy on them for the enemy. The Betas wondered if this had always been the normal etiquette, or if it was a result of the 500 years of war that made the Diamonds realize how cautious they needed to be, even with Gems loyal to them.

 

In either case, it was clear to everyone the Amethysts had nothing to hide. They were completely forthcoming to their superior officers about the mission, and what had gone wrong with it. So while the Agates waited for final word from Pink Diamond to have them cleared to return to active duty, they allowed all the Quartz soldiers to intermingle. “Maybe the Betas will pick up a thing or two from them,” suggested Agate 3xM to Agate 7xE with a derisive snicker; oh how they both wished they could be reassigned back to them. 

 

The only Amethysts the Betas had met up to that point were the ones who had defected to the Crystal Gems, but now they were face-to-face with actual, loyal Prime Quartzes. From all of the stories they had been told from the Agates about how the Primes were all _real_ soldiers, superiorly disciplined and more masterfully crafted compared to the Betas, they thought the Amethysts would look down on them. But the lavender Gems were as excited to see them as they were. They had heard lots of stories - not all of them pleasing - about the back-up battalions from Beta, and were eager to meet the soldiers that had been made to help revitalize their rapidly-dwindling numbers.

 

“Yep. Lots of red and orange and yellow out in these parts. What color was your Kindergarten?” asked Carnelian. 

 

One of the Amethysts, whose teeth were as pointed and sharp as a shark’s, chuckled, sweeping a hand over her body. “Purple, duh.” 

 

Sweeping her blue eyes over the landscape, Jay smiled at Amethyst 8xL. “It’s nice to be back in a Kindergarten, even if it’s not ours, isn’t it? It’s been so long since we last saw Prime.”

 

“How long?” asked Armband, the Jasper with a prominent braid in her hair.

 

“We’ve been on duty practically non-stop now for almost, gosh, five-hundred years, pretty much since the beginning of the war,” explained Elle, scratching the back of her neck. “They keep us spread out across all of the facets. I mean, sometimes it’s pretty nice, when we’re not in the middle of battles all of the time. This planet’s got some wild places to see, let me tell you. We got brought back to Prime a few times, every now and then; it was the base, after all. But we weren’t there when the Crystal Gems officially took it over.”

 

Sharky gritted her sharp teeth and balled up one of her fists in a fit of fury. “Those cowards waited until Pink Diamond had ordered us to protect the Sea Spire, when we would be out of the way, and then Rose Quartz attacked. They took out the single battalion that was left behind guarding it.”

 

“We hear it was a fierce battle,” intercut Elle again. “So many of the Amethysts were taken prisoner, maybe even shattered, and our Kindergarten was suddenly taken from us. A lot of us want to go and fight for it back, but those aren’t the orders we've been given by Pink Diamond yet. We keep hoping she’ll say something about it soon, she has to know how badly we want to go home.”

 

Jasper frowned at this. “Isn’t Homeworld worried that Rose Quartz will start making her own soldiers there?”

 

Gee’s dark eyes widened, seemingly surprised by her question. “That’s not how the Crystal Gems operate. They want to _shut down_ Gem production, not start it up, not even to boost their numbers. They _hate_ the Kindergartens.”

 

“You don’t have to tell _us_ that,” Jasper responded darkly, conceding that Gee had a point. If Rose Quartz were truly smart, she would take advantage of owning the Kindergarten, to produce more soldiers for her little army. But the actions of traitors didn’t have to make sense. It was becoming clear to Jasper that Rose Quartz was someone operating entirely on emotion, as well as selfishness. 

 

Biting her left thumb in discomfort, Jay worked up the courage to ask the Jaspers, “Is it true? The Agates told us the Crystal Gems attacked Beta before the Gems in it fully emerged, that they shattered a lot of you guys. None of us wanted to believe it. But is that true?”

 

A melancholy sigh escaped Skinny, and she crossed her arms protectively in front of her chest. “Yeah.” But she was not in the mood to go into the details of that day with them. The overwhelming confusion and terror she had felt when she was practically pulled from her hole into the blinding world of the living, only to be met with three Crystal Gems who charged at her with weapons poised, fully prepared to kill her for the crime of being a Homeworld soldier, was not something she liked to remember often. Confusion and terror. The first emotions Skinny had ever experienced.

 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” offered Gee. 

 

Elle rubbed her chin. “It’s not really Rose’s style, that’s what’s so strange.” Feeling all of the yellow and orange eyes on her after saying that, she clarified, “You learn a thing or two about an enemy when you’ve fought her for five-hundred years. Rose Quartz doesn’t usually shatter her enemies. She’ll take them prisoner, she’ll make it so we never see them again, but she doesn’t usually shatter Gems in battle.”

 

“Yeah, sure, I guess we’ll have to take your word on that,” said Cheeky with a roll of her eyes, crossing her arms.

 

“Rose Quartz is a soldier, we expected battles with her to be tough. But that raid though,” pointed out Jay, “that’s on a whole ‘nother level. Just when you think you’re starting to know a Gem. I mean, what kind of Quartz would do something so cowardly to other Quartzes, attacking you guys before you even knew how to fight?”

 

“Wow, raiding a Kindergarten before you guys even came out.…” An Amethyst with indigo skin and short white hair shook her head, disturbed at the implications of what all of that meant. “There was a long time between us coming out of the ground and the start of all of this fighting. It wasn't always nice, but we’ve got some good memories of those first days. A Gem needs some time to get to know the world before they're thrown into all this fighting. This war is making Gems do crazy things. But there are just some lines you don’t cross.” The Jaspers and other Amethysts nodded in agreement.

 

“Hey, look at you guys,” said the Amethyst with a cowlick in her hair, pointing to the quadruplets. “I thought I was seeing double squared.”

 

One of the two with an almost solid red left arm, save for an orange band near the top, smiled and explained, “We came out of the same row: W. I’m Eleven. This is Ten.” She hugged the shoulder of her twin who looked exactly like her, except where Eleven had a gemstone on her left thigh, Ten had one on her chest. She pointed to the other two, the twins whose red markings on their left arms only came up to the elbow. “The one with the gem on her thigh is Eight. The other is Nine.”

 

Elle ran up beside Cowlick and grinned with unbridled excitement at the sight of the quadruplets. “Ah! Me, Jay, and Gee all came from column eight. Kay, Aitch, and Dee did too, they are over there somewhere. But none of us look anywhere near as similar to each other as you four do.”

 

A mark of shyness clouded Eight’s yellow eyes and she rubbed the back of her head in embarrassment. “Ah, well, uh, our holes kind of almost merged into each other,” she tried to explain, pointing to the canyon wall across from them. The Amethysts’ sight followed to look at the four holes on row W that, rather than being evenly spaced out like holes should have been, had almost all merged at some corner into each other, with little area of width between them. 

 

“Honestly it’s a miracle we didn’t come out molded into each other or something,” said Ten with a laugh.

 

Nine quipped, “At least that’s what Peridot 14xO says.”

 

“I just can’t believe the Jaspers are taller than us,” grumbled an Amethyst with short lavender hair and a gem on her left eye, aware of how short she felt standing between Starstripe and Tawny; she came only up to a little higher their shoulders. Even the tallest in their group, Sharky, wasn’t as tall as the Jaspers. That didn’t seem fair to Lavender Hair, considering how haphazardly the soldiers from Beta had been built.

 

“It _is_ pretty nice. Though everyone here feels short next to this giant,” said Missing Tooth with a grin as she slapped Jasper across her shoulder. “But there is a Jasper, 7xF, about the height of you guys; she’s in 5xM’s platoon. And there used to be a couple of tiny Jaspers, too, back during the first days. One came out of that hole there.” She indicated at a hole a few inches off the ground in one of the canyon faces. “She didn’t last more than few minutes after she popped out, though. Poor thing. Smashed to pieces by a hammer to the face.” Jay, Elle, and Gee all cringed, thinking about how awful that must have been a way to go.

 

“Don't forget the one that came out of the hole on their side,” said Left Eye, pointing at Jasper and Skinny. “She was about Carnelian’s size. An Obsidian stepped on her back and cracked her gemstone. It was super quick, like that.” She snapped her finger for emphasis, making Indigo next to her bite her nails nervously.

 

Lavender Hair frowned in sympathy. “A bunch of us have been there. That’s rough.”

 

Sharky jumped in, “Elle said she thinks Emm below her was probably going to come out stunted, since her hole was so close to the ground.” She gnawed on her bottom lip for a second, recalling how the Amethysts from Column 8 had waited so long for Emm to burst out of her hole. They had wanted to be a complete unit. “But she never came out, so we’ll probably never know.” Leaving her behind was as hard as it was to lose so many of the other Amethysts who fought during the Battle for Prime. If she emerged during the Crystal Gem occupation, they could only hope the rebels might take mercy on Emm.

 

“So I guess even you Amethysts weren’t so _perfect_ , after all,” snapped Jasper with unwarranted, earning her a soft-but-firm elbow in the ribs from Skinny.

 

With an uneasy look, Sharky responded, “Uh, I guess not….”

 

Skinny shot Jasper a look from the corners of her eyes, one her mountainous twin ignored. The lanky soldier did not have to wonder where her sister’s complex was coming from. She wondered how frustrated Jasper must have started to feel, being so big and so strong but still associated with the inferiorly made Beta, always second-best to even the most inferiorly-designed Amethyst. But that wasn’t the faults of the Amethysts, who had never once so far treated their Jasper and Carnelian counterparts as anything less than equals. So there was no need for Jasper to take her resentment out on them.

 

Looking at the holes, the Amethyst with burgundy coloring and a chipped tooth grinned and poked one of her sisters on the shoulder, whose gemstone was smack in the middle of her forehead. “Makes you miss your own hole, doesn’t it?”

 

Forehead swept her eyes over the Kindergarten and smiled nostalgically. “Yeah. Nothing like hole sweet hole.” She went up to the exit hole Cleft stood next to and looked inside of it, observing, “They’re so different from the ones in Prime, though. Ours were in neat rows and columns, spaced out pretty evenly. All of yours are so…eclectic.”

 

Clenching her fists in an instinctive act of insecurity, Jasper was prepared to make a remark, but Skinny cut her off. “Yeah, we get that a lot from the Peridots.” She gave Jasper another look that said ‘ _Humor our guests, and please don’t make a scene_.’ She knew the Amethysts meant nothing mean-spirited by it, unlike all the Homeworld Gems who came to the place. They were simply curious, and Beta _was_ a unique place, to put a positive spin on it.

 

Swallowing down her frustration, Jasper instead arched an eyebrow and asked the platoon’s leader with a callous smirk, “So tell us how you all got stuck in that cell we had to rescue you from.”

 

Jay made a face but the promise of a story got Carnelian and all of the Jaspers thrilled from the looks on their faces. So brushing aside her embarrassment, Jay explained, “Pink Diamond got a report that the Crystal Gems were attacking the Mountain Spire. The Rubies that were supposed to be guarding it weren't there, I think the rebels had taken them out. Our platoon was closest, so Pink Diamond sent us in to stop them and reclaim the spire. As soon as we arrived, we were ambushed. The Crystal Gems had two fusions on their side we’d never seen before. We were overwhelmed!”

 

Her smirk turning into a scowl, Jasper grumbled, “Fusion is for cowards. They knew they couldn’t beat you on their own, they’re too weak.” As much as she hated them, she could at least respect her enemies as long as they fought her as they were. But fusion was nothing more than a cheap tactic, fit only for weak Gems like Rubies.

 

“Rose Quartz herself was there,” jumped in Chip with her slight lisp. “I saw her on the top of the spire, with a flag staff in her hand. Everything happened so fast. It was like that forest came alive, it blocked off our exit. They got us all cornered, and suddenly we were trapped. Then here came Rose Quartz, talking about how she wanted us to join her rebellion. She went on and on about how we were all individuals who could be whatever we wanted to be, as long as we fought for her instead of Pink Diamond.”

 

A mixture of confusion, disgust, and sadness pervaded the faces of all the Quartzes present. It was undoubtedly Rose Quartz’s most genius tactic: steal the soldiers from Homeworld by turning them against each other. Prime against Prime, what better way to undermine Homeworld? “And…And a couple of Amethysts went with her,” admitted Jay, furrowing her brows in distress. “We lost Eff from column eight.” She, Elle, and Gee each felt the pang of betrayal in their cores. They weren’t even angry, it was clear to anybody who could reach their faces that more than anything, they were saddened and hurt by their sister’s treason.

 

Chip continued with the story. “Well, the rest of us wouldn’t betray Pink Diamond, of course. So Rose Quartz ordered the Crystal Gems to round us up. But I heard her command them all not to shatter us. She really seemed to stress that to everyone, especially this Bismuth that was there, they got into a fight about it. It was weird. We thought then that maybe she was just going to take us as prisoners back to their base, but no, she told her army to lock us up in the bottom of the spire.”

 

That appeared to surprise the Betas, who stared back with agape mouths and wide eyes. Jasper bared her teeth. While they had never seen Rose Quartz during any of the battles at their Kindergarten, she had never seemed to have any compunction about having her army shatter _them_. This behavior was odd and confusing, to say the least. “Why would she do that?” asked Jasper.

 

Jay shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, even then about twenty of ours were cracked anyways, during the battle. We didn’t even get to keep them down in the cell. The Crystal Gems took them away.” Her purple eyes got sad at that, remembering the Gems that were lost to them now. Who knew whatever happened to Homeworld Gems in enemy hands? 

 

“Maybe she’s going to heal them with her tears,” suggested Gee, finding it hard to mask the hope in her voice. What would be a Gem’s choice then, though, she wondered? Turn traitor or what? Be shattered? Be harvested? Either way, their sisters would never see them again.

 

Nine of row W raised an eyebrow. “Her healing what now?” All of the Jaspers, plus Carnelian, clearly had no idea what they were talking about. That was the first time they had heard about anything like that.

 

Now it was the Primes’ turn to look at the Betas with shock and amazement. “You didn’t know about that?” asked Indigo. The Betas shook their head in silence. It was so easy to forget how young these new soldiers were. Of course they wouldn't know. The Amethyst explained further. “They say it’s just a rumor, but it isn’t. Rose Quartz can heal her soldiers with her tears! I’ve seen Gems that I’ve personally cracked come back and fight us again, their gemstones as shiny as the day they popped out of the dirt. It’s how she’s been winning against us, she’s cheating! She can heal her soldiers, but Pink Diamond can’t heal us, how are we supposed to win against those odds?”

 

“Wow,” was all a thoroughly dazed Skinny could think to say, and none of the others had anything they could add. The news astonished the Quartz of Beta. If the Primes couldn’t beat those odds, what hope in the world did they have? The Betas were fragile enough as it was. How could they win against an enemy who could heal all damage taken to her army? In the back of Jasper's mind, she came to realization. There could only be one solution, then: they _had_ to shatter their enemies, to keep them from coming back. Get the Crystal Gems before they could do the same to them.

 

Not wanting to think about such a depressing thought as the hopelessness of fighting an enemy that could heal, Carnelian brought the topic back to the story, asking Gee, “So Rose told them to lock you guys up?”

 

Gee nodded. “The Crystal Gems took us all downstairs and destroyed our communicators. Then they threw us in the cell at the bottom of the spire and locked us in. Guess after that they booby-trapped the whole place, and deactivated the warp pad, hoping no one would be able to get to us. And we couldn’t escape! That thing was designed to be impenetrable, none of us could make a dent in those walls. And if we tried to dig out from the bottom, well that just leaded to a dead drop straight down from the sky.”

 

Raising an eyebrow skeptically, Skinny noted, “So she didn’t want anyone to shatter you guys, but had no problem just tossing you in a bunker for a couple of months, probably with the intention of keeping you there much longer? And then fortify the spire so anyone who did go looking for you would have their work cut out for them?”

 

“Sounds like they were planning to keep all of you there forever,” said Carnelian with a gasp.

 

“How _noble_ of them,” remarked Jasper, sarcasm dripping with every word. Then she noted, “But even that doesn’t make sense. Those traps were a joke. They might have deterred some weak Gems, like a Peridot or something, but they were nothing for Quartz soldiers like us to go up against. Didn’t they know at some point Pink Diamond would recuse you guys? They were either stupid, or this was some kind of trick on Rose’s part. I think it was an insult to Pink Diamond, like she was taunting her that she could keep you guys locked up under such pathetic circumstances and she didn’t think our Diamond could do anything about it. But she was wrong.”

 

The Amethysts frowned, all of their faces fallen with apprehension and bemusement at everything the Betas had said. The thought had occurred to them for the weeks they were stuck in the cell. The dark enclosed space that could barely fit all of them did not bother them so much at first; it was just like a giant hole, and tight confines were a familiar, almost comforting feeling for Gems whose first memories were growing and coming out of such spaces. But as time passed, they had gotten more and more worried. What if the Crystal Gems won the war and never returned? What if Homeworld never found them? What would happen? Now they felt guilty for having underestimated their Diamond. Of course Pink Diamond would send someone to retrieve them. They were lucky to serve under such a benevolent creator.

 

“When you put it that way,” said the Amethyst with a gem on her chest and a large tuft in her light pink hair to Jasper and Skinny, “it’s a good thing you two found us, then.”

 

“So, uh, thanks for that,” said Gee. She and Tuft gave them a thumbs-up.

 

“Ah-hah, there are more of the Amethysts.” All of the Quartzes turned around to see three Peridots walking up to meet them. If anyone was even more excited to see the Primes than the Betas were, it was the Peridots. The technicians could hardly contain their glee at examining the purple Quartzes up close, thoughtlessly invading their personal spaces to look at a bright gemstone here, and a finely-crafted muscle there. “Now see,” Peridot 6xL said to the young Peridot 1xI, pulling over the Amethyst with the gemstone on her forehead to show off, “ _this_ is how it’s done.”

 

“So tell me,” said Skinny under her breath to Elle, “are _all_ Peridots like this or…?”

 

Elle stifled a chortle behind her hand. “Most of them, yeah. Annoying, huh?”

 

Peridot 1xI rubbed her chin and nodded in understanding, ignoring the bemused look on Forehead’s face, yet she asked, “But if Prime was the superior Kindergarten, then why are they shorter than the Jaspers?”

 

Peridot 14xO laughed, like the young Peridot in front of her had said the most ridiculous thing in the universe. “It’s not the _height_ that makes the difference,” she explained carefully, gesticulating wildly between the Amethysts and Jaspers as she did so. “It’s the _material_ used that really matters, dontcha know? Most of these Jaspers and Carnelians were tall, with a few exceptions.” She gave a hard look to where Carnelian was laughing due to Sharky putting her in a playful headlock.

 

“Aww c’mon, techies,” begged Cleft, pulling Forehead back to save her from the Peridots’ prodding. “Don’t go starting with all that. Not while the Primes are here.” It was bad enough the Peridots felt no compunctions about voicing their criticisms about the Betas to their faces, but to so openly scrutinize them in front of the Amethysts? That was embarrassing. 

 

Looking at her like she had no business speaking to her that way, Peridot 6xL said, “And why not? They would agree, after all.” Not bothering to ask the Prime Quartzes whether or not this assumption was true, she continued speaking to Peridot 1xI. “The Amethysts you see here are the result of a well thought out Kindergarten. You should read the log on it: the spaces between the holes were even, the depth was consistent, the rows were, for the most part, symmetrical. All-around amazing work. The terraformers and technicians should be proud.”

 

“But again,” interjected Peridot 14xO with a long, raised finger, “it all comes down to the _material_. The location chosen for Prime was magnificent. Strong, sturdy rock makes for strong, sturdy Quartzes. This place, however, _ugh_.” She took a second to glance around from behind her visor at the desert, brushing sand off her arms to illustrate a point. “Had it not been for the fact that Homeworld was pressed for time to get soldiers on the ground, and environments were limited due to Crystal Gem activity, they _never_ would have made a Kindergarten at this spot.”

 

The Amethysts stood there frozen, looking at the humiliation and shame wash over the features of their Beta comrades. Jasper narrowed her eyes. “What are you talking about?”

 

“Yeah,” Carnelian said, trying to laugh the insult off, “I mean, I know you guys think our Kindergarten is pretty awful and that we’re like the worst and all, but just because it was rushed doesn’t mean we weren’t supposed to be made or something.”

 

“No, that’s exactly what I mean,” Peridot 14xO said matter-of-factly, the look on her face indicating she did not understand Carnelian’s humor nor Jasper’s frustration at the subject in the slightest. “Did no one explain it to you brutes at all? No, I suppose the Agates wouldn’t. Eighty-nine Kindergartens were originally planned by the Diamonds for this planet. Prime was a major success in Facet 5, and all of the others were to be modeled after it. The plans were to originally begin building the next Kindergarten in Facet 3. But then the Rebellion started, prohibiting the immediate construction at that area. At first, we weren’t too worried, of course. Everyone thought the rebellion would be squashed in a short amount of time. We still had production going in Prime, making Quartzes while the technicians prepped for the construction of the next Kindergarten.”

 

Peridot 6xL took over. “But Crystal Gem activity made Facet 3 too dangerous to begin production, and this went on for many cycles; the scouts they sent out to probe the site there never returned. The same thing happened when they considered Facets 4 and 7 for the location. It was simply too hazardous. The only place the Crystal Gems hadn’t infiltrated was Facet 9. And after the numbers of Amethysts began to dwindle, Pink Diamond finally ordered a new Kindergarten to be made here, assisted by the radiant Yellow Diamond and Blue Diamond as well. However, it wasn’t until after the Lapis Lazulis were finished terraforming the area that everyone realized just how much of a joke this place was: the curved canyons, the way the rock just blows away in the wind. How could this place _not_ produce a bunch of defects? Eh, but by that point it was too late. It was this, or nothing. Heh.” She couldn’t help but snicker, annoying her audience. “It’s funny when you think about it. You all were made to kill her, but if it wasn’t for Rose Quartz, none of you would have even been made in the first place.”

 

None of the Beta Quartzes found that proclamation particularly funny. 

 

It was awkward small talk for the rest of the time between the Primes and Betas before the announcement came on the communicators from Pink Diamond that the Amethysts had been officially cleared to return to duty. Word was that she was absolutely thrilled that they had been successfully rescued. And they were already being called to Facet 4, to join another platoon from Prime. Although they were only together for a short period of time, the Betas found it hard to watch them go. 

 

“Hopefully we'll meet up again one day,” said Jay as the Quartzes all gave each other the Diamond salute. 

 

Sharky grinned in sheepish chagrin. “And maybe under less humiliating circumstances than getting stuck in a bunker next time.” But seeing the looks they were getting from the four Agates standing at the heads of the battalions, the Amethysts gave another quick salute, and marched their way over to the warp pad. They left a dozen at a time, each group disappearing behind the bright light of the transporter, until all of them were gone, leaving the Betas alone again. 

 

After they were dismissed, Carnelian sighed, throwing her hands behind her head. “Aww, I’m gonna miss them. It was nice having Gems around who aren’t Agates and Peridots.” Gems who didn’t think they were complete jokes. Gems who could understand them. Gems who were made from the same Earth as they were. Gems who were their sisters-in-arms.


	8. The Reunion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> During another raid on the Beta Kindergarten by the Crystal Gems, Jasper and Skinny are reunited with a Gem they long assumed gone. But the reunion is not a happy one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who left kudos last chapter. If you enjoy this chapter please consider leaving a comment. It's the only way I can determine there's enough interest to keep trying to crank these out at a decent pace.

A haze always settled over her during the midst of a battle. One she could not blame on the blazing yellow sun that baked the sand dunes in the desert of Beta. It was a coping mechanism, after all, it helped her focus on the moment. She did not have time to think about her own mortality when the constant onslaught of enemies never ceased advancing on her and her sisters. She would only clench her fists and charge forward into the group of attacking forces, relishing the impact when her helmet connected with the sternums of her foes. She was made for this, and she was good at it.

 

Sometimes she wasn’t even paying attention to what type of Gem she was fighting. Was that a Topaz she had just punched into the air? Did a Cocroite try stabbing her in the shoulder with a knife? Did she just dissipate a Ruby? What was a Prehnite even doing out here getting her dainty little face slammed into the sand? In the end, it made no difference to Jasper. 

 

All she kept telling herself was that she could not let them take the Kindergarten. That had always been the order. It was the first command she had ever received from her superiors on that crushing first day: not “survive” but “drive them out;” she’d learned “survive” on her own. And now she knew even more about how important it was to keep Beta out of the hands of Rose Quartz and her ilk. Contact with Amethyst 8xJ and her platoon from Prime the previous year had stressed the urgency of holding their ground at all costs. The Crystal Gems were not trying to take the Kindergartens to start their own production of soldiers; they wanted to end Gem production on Earth, period. If they stole Beta, the war was over. Pink Diamond would lose. Jasper could not allow that to happen, not if she had it in her power to stop it. She would win.

 

Jasper did not understand her enemies. She could not, and she dared not try. Why did they have such low regard for Gem life that they would do such a thing? Why did they value the organic life of Earth more than the Gem soldiers they were trying to destroy? What would possibly motivate them to rebel against their Diamonds - who had given them life - and disrupt the natural order? How could the treacherous Rose Quartz possibly compare to the loving Pink Diamond? What could Rose Quartz offer them that Pink Diamond couldn’t?

 

She had no time to ask such questions, as a Beryl slammed into her back, trying to knock her off her feet. But Jasper caught her footing, grabbed the Beryl around her chest and slammed her over her shoulder, pile-driving her onto the ground. When a disloyal Amethyst tried slicing at her with a sword, Jasper ducked, then cracked the battering ram of her helmet under the Amethyst’s jaw, sending her back into her gemstone. 

 

Three Tourmalines hit her with their massive fists, they kicked and punched down on her. She defended herself with her arms, trying to soften the blows. When one slipped up, Jasper took advantage of her mistake and headbutted her in the gut with her helmet. Her gemstone landed on the sand. So did another Tourmaline’s when Jasper violently ripped her gemstone off her arm. The third Tourmaline, in a fit of rage, grabbed her arms and pried them behind her back before slamming her head into a canyon boulder, where her helmet crumbled the rock on impact. Then she did it again, and again, and again, trying to crack the visor on Jasper’s helmet so she might get a shot at the gemstone on her face.

 

But all of a sudden there came a stabbing pain in Tourmaline’s side, and when the green-and-pink Gem looked down she saw a thin Jasper pulling out the spear she had just impaled her with. Tourmaline poofed and yet another gemstone fell to the ground as a victory for Homeworld’s side. “Looked like you could use some help,” Skinny observed with a dry smile. Jasper checked her visor for damage and, finding none, smirked in return.

 

“Let me repay the favor,” she said with a firm nod. “Jump now.”

 

Skinny leapt out of the way in time to avoid being skewered by the spear of another attacking Amethyst. Jasper slammed her fist into the Crystal Gem’s stomach, knocking her into the gorge wall. From the corner of her eye, Skinny could see Carnelian chasing a blue Prehnite off. The red Quartz whacked her club into the Prehnite’s ribs, knocking the aristocratic Gem to her hands and knees in the sand. With another strong strike, this time to the head, Prehnite dissipated back into her gemstone. 

 

Wiping her forehead with the back of her hand, Carnelian looked at the chaos all around her. This hadn’t been a random raid; this had been planned, strategized, it was different from the other times. They had seen the Crystal Gems coming, although where they materialized, it was impossible to tell. Homeworld had sent them scouting the area surrounding Beta many times now, and never had they been able to find where their enemies came from. Yellow Diamond and Blue Diamond had even ordered the deactivation of the nearest warp pad outside Facet 9, but that didn’t stop the Crystal Gems. And every attempt at having someone stealthily follow them upon their retreats ended in that Quartz never coming back. It made everyone paranoid. It was like the Crystal Gems could just manifest from thin air. It was almost like they knew Beta better than the Gems grown there did.

 

From where she was standing, Carnelian could see Cleft slicing her axe through a Chrysocolla. An Obsidian knocked Spikey on her helmet before bolting away from her. Tawny used her spear to block the blow of a Feldspar’s hammer, and Two-Tone came to the save with a blow to the enemy’s back with her mace. Another Feldspar had Missing Tooth in a headlock, but Starstripe stabbed the Crystal Gem with her short sword, poofing her. The Quadruplets were each fending off a variety of foes. Kneecap kicked a Chalcedony in the head. Armband was saved from having the gemstone on her chest smashed by quick thinking from Red Nose, who tackled the Amethyst to the ground. Left Eye cleaved her mace into a Benitoite’s side. Split and 2xF had teamed up to take down a particularly nasty Vermarine. Every Quartz had her hands full, but the Jaspers were successfully starting to drive the Crystal Gems out of the Kindergarten again.

 

Carnelian was knocked out of her stupor when a fist connected with her temple and sent her falling on her back. Picking herself up and shaking her head to joggle out the kinks from the hit, it amazed her to see the attack had come from a Ruby. A common Ruby, all on her own, not even with others around her to fuse with, as was typical with their type. The little red Gem stood defiantly in front of her, her gemstone embedded in the palm of her left hand while the right hand that had punched Carnelian was encased in a crystalline gauntlet. 

 

Ruby did a double-take when she took another look at her enemy, and despite all of the fighting going on around her, she put her hands on her hips and gave a little laugh; not mean-spirited, like Carnelian had heard many times before, but instead one of genuine amusement, although to Carnelian it did not matter at the moment so long as Ruby was trying to fight her and her sisters. “Hey, you’re pretty small for a Quartz, aren’t you?”

 

“Oh my gosh, I know, will everyone shut up about that already!” screamed Carnelian in frustration and swung her club at the Ruby, who ducked at the right moment to keep her face from being crunched in. Where did Ruby get off calling her small, when she didn’t even come up to her chin? That may have been normal for her cut of Gem, but Carnelian was sick and tired of the extra insult to injury always being leveled at her; it wasn’t bad enough that the Crystal Gems were attacking her home and her sisters, but they had to keep pointing out how defective she was as a Quartz soldier? Didn’t she get enough of that already from the Agates and Peridots?

 

Ruby was ready to launch another assault, but then she heard the call from her comrades. “Retreat! Retreat!” Gritting her teeth, Ruby seethed so much the sand started burning under her feet, crystalizing. “Grrr, I can’t believe Sapphire called this one. Well, okay, I can, but she’s never gonna let me hear the end of it.” Without an explanation, she left a bewildered Carnelian behind her and ran off with the rest of the retreating Crystal Gems.

 

Knowing the Agates would always order them to try and follow, Carnelian tried keeping up with the Ruby, dipping into her spin dash to race after the Crystal Gems. But then the fusions came. Inevitably, to give the others time to get out, the rebels would start fusing with each other, coming up with new cross-Gem beings that could match many Quartzes at a time. A Beryl quickly fused with a renegade Amethyst, and suddenly a tall, icy white-and-blue Gem - Bazzite - stood where there had been two. The giant stopped Carnelian in her tracks with a swift stomp, along with a handful of Jaspers, and kept her from catching the Ruby. 

 

“I’m about to blow your minds,” said the fusion with a grin. Bazzite summoned her weapon, a set of giant fans, and with a quick flick of her wrists, sent the Quartzes flying back off their feet. Carnelian rolled all the way back down the pass, crashing into even more Jaspers, where they all laid, defeated. None of them could hope to take on a fusion of that size, it was better just to let the Crystal Gems leave. They could deal with their Agate yelling at them later over it.

 

 

 

Just outside the entrance of the Kindergarten, Jasper threw off more and more large Gems who jumped on her to give time for the weaker Gems to escape. She blocked a kick to her gut, only to get punched across her cheek. She yelled when a Zircon bit her arm, and smashed her fist into the assailant’s face to get her to stop. She kept punching. A Topaz. An Agate. A Chalcedony. A Selenite. An Amethyst. All of them started blurring together. It didn’t matter what types of Gems they were. She kept punching. It was what she knew how to do. 

 

Until there was no one left to punch. She became aware of how she was now standing alone, save for the last stragglers of Crystal Gems running past her to withdraw into the setting sun behind the dunes. She might have even seen some Jaspers following them. Undoubtedly one of the Tumbled Peach Agates was trying to make them shadow their enemies again, to find out just where they disappeared to after these battles. It wouldn’t matter. They never found out. All Jasper could hope was that the scouts would return back to them, instead of being lost forever, leaving everyone else to wonder what happened.

 

Gemstones laid strewn about around her. How many had she taken out this day? Fifty? Sixty? It was hard to count. Crystal Gems always tried to grab as many as they could during their retreats. Why wasn’t it ever enough? Why didn’t it ever seem to stop? Jasper knew now. It never stopped because Rose Quartz could heal her soldiers. Her tears were enough to repair all damage short of shattering. How could the Betas hope to compete against forces like that? How could Jasper hope to still win, when she knew, deep down, that one lucky hit on her own gemstone would be it for her? Her, the most powerful Quartz made on the planet. And if she was that vulnerable, what chances did her sisters have?

 

She felt a touch on her shoulder and with knee-jerk reflexes reeled around to backhand the opponent who dared touch her. “Whoa, relax, it’s me!” The bloodlust in Jasper’s eyes diluted when she recognized the voice and face of the one standing next to her as those belonging to Skinny, and she stilled her hand. 

 

“Don’t sneak up on me!” she yelled, startling her sororal twin, who instinctively backed up. Even Jasper was surprised by the force with which she said it. Had she been scared? No. She had to control herself better than that. Soldiers weren’t allowed to be scared. Forcing herself to calm down, she asked, “What is it?” She followed where Skinny’s thin arm was pointing to, tracing from the hand to the extended forefinger, catching a silhouette walking towards them, standing out of place amongst the disarray of all the Gems running the other way.

 

“I’m glad I found you two!”

 

Jasper could not believe her eyes and had to blink multiple times to be sure they weren’t deceiving her. The familiar muscular build. The distinctive red stripes up her arms and face. The orange-and-yellow oval stone where her right eye might otherwise have been. They knew her: Jasper: Facet 9 Cut-8xA. 

 

Jasper heard her twin gasp beside her, spilling the nickname that had been given to this sister. “Right Eye….” For a moment, both felt ecstatic, overjoyed that their long-lost sister had come back. They both recalled that night at the ice caverns, when they had last seen Right Eye, clinging to that icicle, right before it broke off and sent her falling into the ravine. But here she was, alive and in one piece, unharmed. She had found her way back to them. Sororal love filled them to their cores at this unexpected reunion.

 

It mixed with confusion, however, with the lingering anxiety from the aftermath of a fight. Where had she come from? Were the other seventeen that had vanished with her down the ravine at the ice caverns okay, were they here too? And then, surrounded by smoke as they were, Jasper’s sight settled on 8xA’s uniform, and her brows knitted at the bridge of her gemstone in bewilderment: the pink diamond emblem on Right Eye’s chest was no longer there, replaced instead with a large pink star. 

 

“No…,” was all that could fall from Jasper’s mouth. The grin that spread over her face at seeing Right Eye again fell into a frown, and she shook her head in denial. No. No. Not one of their own….

 

Skinny must have noticed as well, since she abruptly stopped where she had been walking towards Right Eye, and gaped at the pink star on her uniform. “What?” she gasped, taking a few hesitant steps back. “You didn’t….”

 

Right Eye’s face warmed up in an unsure smile and she spread her arms open in a gesture of momentary truce. “It’s not what you think, you guys,” she tried assuring them. But with each step she took towards Jasper and Skinny, the more tense they became, the worst the hurt on their faces stung her. She kept trying. “We had no idea what this whole situation was even about! Things on Homeworld are so much worse than we’ve been led to believe. Gems have been treated horribly, by the Diamonds. Rose Quartz, she and the Crystal Gems want to change that.”

 

Grinding her teeth, a deep scowl marred Jasper’s face, and white-hot rage began pumping through her plasma blood. She barely registered what Right Eye was telling her. All she could focus on was the pink star, the symbol of Rose Quartz, the symbol of betrayal. “No!”

 

Beside her, Skinny her shook her head back and forth unbelievingly. “What are you talking about?” she implored Right Eye, wanting to make sense of what was happening. This was all making her head spin. She could barely wrap her head around it. Right Eye? A traitor? What in the world had happened after she disappeared at the ice caverns? “Where were you? What did they do to you?”

 

“They _rescued_ me!” screamed Right Eye with determination, furrowing her dark brows, spilling out the aching feelings of personal injury that had been done to her that night: the hurt of being left behind, the sensation of knowing just how little she meant to her superiors, how she wasn't worth saving. “Pink Diamond would have left me to rot in the bottom of that ravine forever!”

 

“That’s not true,” Skinny said, tightening the hold on her spear when Right Eye took another step closer. “Pink Diamond _does_ care about us. She’s sent us on rescue missions before. I’m sure eventually they would have sent someone to find you.” She felt a sharp pang in her abdomen. Whether it was from the guilt of having not been able to save Right Eye from falling, or the lingering uncertainty of her own words, despite her most fervent wish to believe them to be true, she did not know.

 

An ugly sneer blemished Right Eye’s lips, and she looked at Skinny as if she were a fool. “Don’t you understand? Pink Diamond _doesn't_ care about us, none of the Diamonds do. Pink Diamond spent all of that effort making us just to send us out here to die for her war. We’re just pawns to the Diamond Authority, expendable soldiers that they can just keep making more and more of to try and win. But Rose Quartz and her army found me, and the other Jaspers that survived. The Crystal Gems offered to heal us, if we would just hear them out.”

 

“Where are the others?!” demanded Jasper darkly.

 

“Three are gone, their gemstones shattered when they hit the bottom,” explained Right Eye, a flicker of pain shining in her golden left eye at the memory of finding their shards in the snow. “Seven of them refused to listen to the Crystal Gems. They took them away and bubbled them. But they’re alive, don’t worry, they’re at Rose Quartz’s base. As for 3xD, 5xN, and 6xN, they were too stubborn, they tried fighting back. The Crystal Gems cracked them in the scuffle. I think they’re alive, too. Rose promised me that she’ll heal them and try to talk to them again later.”

 

That wasn’t the answer Jasper wanted to hear, and each word Right Eye said sent the furrows deepening on her face. To think of their sisters, prisoners of Rose Quartz, hidden away somewhere at a base no one from Homeworld had been able to locate. But that still only accounted for fourteen Jaspers, including Right Eye. She needed to hear it confirmed what she suspected. “What about the other four?”

 

Right Eye puffed her chest out a little. “12xA, 4xD, 7xD, 3xF, and I decided we could not keep fighting for Homeworld when we learned the truth.”

 

“You let them take our own!” Jasper clenched her fists tightly and the teeth grinding had evolved into full-on gnashing as she felt her bloodlust boiling again. When she looked at Right Eye, she no longer could see her long-lost sister coming home; all she could see was red. “You let them bubble and throw away the Gems you were made with, who fought with you! You sold them out to Rose Quartz!”

 

“D-Don’t start with that,” said Right Eye, taking a step back at the sight of Jasper’s anger, but narrowed her working eye. “You and the others left us behind.”

 

“Tumbled Peach Agate ordered us to return to the Kindergarten,” Skinny attempted to explain, desperate to try and fix this. But that answer didn’t seem to satisfy the turncoat Jasper in front of them. The bitter sting of betrayal could be felt in all three Betas.

 

“Of course she did,” Right Eye said with a growl under her breath, balling her fists by her sides; Skinny detected how her arms were shaking. “I told you, Homeworld doesn't care about us. We’re just pawns to them.” Her voice cracked with desperation, and she shouted to her sisters gravely, trying her best to make them comprehend her words, “You must understand, the Crystal Gems are not our enemies, they didn’t want this fight! If you just come and talk with her, you’ll see that Rose Quartz is _good!_ ”

 

Jasper felt something snap in her as she yelled back at Right Eye. “Good? Good?! How can you stand there telling us Rose Quartz is good after everything she and those Crystal Traitors have done to us?! She’s trying to take our planet! She betrayed our Diamond! She made her army tear us out of our holes! They wiped out the Carnelians! They’ve killed over a thousand of us! Rose Quartz won’t stop until we’re all wiped out and our Kindergarten is shut down permanently! She's the reason we’ve been fighting nonstop for all of these years!”

 

“ _Pink Diamond_ is the reason we’ve been fighting!” protested Right Eye.

 

Eyes hazed over in blinding fury, Jasper lunged at her. “I’ll shatter you!” 

 

Had Jasper been able to get her hands around Right Eye at that moment, she would have slammed her fist right into her gemstone and ground her shards into dust. But Right Eye was saved at the last moment when a Tourmaline blindsided the big Beta Quartz, bulldozing into Jasper’s side and pinning her to the ground. Jasper thrashed wildly, kicking up sand everywhere, trying desperately to throw the Crystal Gem off, but Tourmaline concentrated her bulk on keeping her opponent down, and looked up at Right Eye with visible frustration. “What are you doing, newbie? We have to retreat, get out of here!” 

 

Right Eye still stood still in a moment of shock, disturbed beyond expression at realizing her Kindergarten sister had been fully prepared to kill her, but then snapped out of it long enough to take off running in the direction of the last retreating Crystal Gems. Seeing her bolt, Jasper fought in a frenzy to try and get Tourmaline off of her, but the rebel did everything in her power to keep her hold on her. When Jasper saw Skinny racing over to help, she cried out manically, “She’s getting away! Don’t let her get away! Stop her! ”

 

Skidding to a halt, Skinny looked over her shoulder to glare at Right Eye’s back as she ran away. Knowing her twin would be able to handle the Tourmaline with just a little more time, she listened to her plea, dematerializing her spear before tucking herself into her spin dash and chasing after the other Jasper. Right Eye did not even see her coming, and Skinny slammed into her back with the force of her acceleration, knocking her down and kicking up a cloud of sand. Unrolling herself, Skinny rematerialized her weapon just as Right Eye scrambled to stand back up on her feet.

 

The two Jaspers stared each other down. Right Eye summoned her own weapon, her mace, the weapon she had used so many times against the Crystal Gems; now she pointed it at one of the Betas she had been born with, who had come from the same wall she had. “Don’t you understand?” she asked again, chest heaving as she tried to keep from breaking down, to swallow her sobs down so they could harden into bitter reserve. “I’m trying to save you! I want to save our Kindergarten! All of the fighting would end if all of the soldiers would just put down their weapons and stop fighting for Homeworld. It really is that easy.”

 

Skinny grimaced in agony. She didn’t understand. “They’re killing us. We didn’t do anything to Rose Quartz or the rebels. They attacked us first. Why don’t _they_ stop fighting first?”

 

Right Eye’s face fell, and for a moment she reflected over the question, a painful expression in her yellow eye. But rather than ponder over that point, she gritted her teeth and furrowed her brows in resolution. “You never were the brightest cut, you twig.” In a flash, Right Eye charged at Skinny with her mace. She swung the mace down, but Skinny blocked the blow with the staff of her spear, and then swept it down and knocked Right Eye off her feet. She put her foot on the Crystal Gem’s chest to keep her from standing up again, and pointed the end of her spear at the gemstone where her right eye would have been. 

 

The fight, as it had been, was over, just like that. Now all that was left to do was deal with her. Do onto traitors what had to be done. Skinny needed to do this, she told herself. She needed to shatter Right Eye…. Or at least crack her. Yeah, crack her gemstone. Or…. Or maybe take her back and give her to Pink Diamond to do as she saw fit. Perhaps their Diamond would be merciful. Then again, perhaps not. Maybe the most merciful thing would be just to end things here. Skinny’s head was spinning as she struggled to make a choice. She suddenly felt heavy, like a weight had just been placed on her shoulders. She hated it. She hated all of this. All she wanted to do right now was to break down and cry. But the others needed her to be strong. She had to prove she was a real Quartz soldier. The spear in her hands shook even as she poised it for the final hit.

 

But when she saw the look of fear on the face of the Jasper below her, she remembered the ice caverns again, how she had not caught her in time before that icicle broken off. If she had just been able to reach Right Eye then, if she had tried harder, none of this would have ever happened. She reminded herself that. She didn’t want to kill her Beta sister. How could she possibly want to do something like that? Right Eye was one of theirs. All Skinny wanted to do now was save her, bring her back to the others, to welcome her home.

 

In her moment of hesitation, Right Eye swung her right arm up and smashed her mace into Skinny’s chest. Yellow eyes shrinking to pinpricks, the lanky Jasper looked down in shock at the weapon embedded into her lower rib cage, barely having a second to register what had just happened to her before her form dissipated, poofing in a puff of smoke that left only her oval gemstone behind, falling atop the sand. 

 

Clambering back to her feet, Right Eye gave her a pitying look when she stood, in disbelief at what she had done. She considered picking up the gemstone to take Skinny back with her to Rose Quartz, so maybe she would finally understand why she had to switch sides if they were going to save their Kindergarten. She ought to have, she thought. But when Right Eye turned her head at the sound of an encroaching noise, and saw Jasper barreling towards her, she decided to cut her losses, rolling into her own spin dash and taking off after the rest of the Crystal Gems into the desert. 

 

Jasper wanted desperately to follow her, to let her anger keep driving her until she caught the renegade Quartz. But seeing Skinny poof into her gemstone, it froze her boiling rage. All of the fight went out of her then. Now was the time, she realized, to pull back. There would be another day to get her hands on Right Eye. 

 

A small bundle of maroon hair rolled up to her, and upon unrolling Carnelian gasped when she recognized the gemstone on the ground. “Is that Skinny? Beefy, what happened?” she asked Jasper.

 

But Jasper was suddenly aware of how depleted her strength was at that moment, like she felt every hit she had taken that day all at once. But none hurt as badly as Right Eye’s betrayal; that cut to the core. Right Eye had come with the Crystal Gems to attack them at their home, she had forsaken Pink Diamond for Rose Quartz, and now she had almost killed one of her sisters. Jasper would never forgive Right Eye for that. Reaching down, she scooped up Skinny’s gemstone in the palm of her hand. “Let’s go,” she said to Carnelian, leading her back into the entrance of the Kindergarten. 

 

Homeworld celebrated. They declared the battle a major victory for their faction. For the first time in a long while, there were more casualties on the Crystal Gems’ side than their own. To the loyal Gems across the various facets, that was wonderful news. They hadn’t been that impressed with Facet 9 since they’d heard tales of a Quartz from there that had taken out eighty Crystal Gems on her first day. To the Betas, however, the triumph was spoiled by the knowledge that even some of their own couldn’t be trusted anymore. 

 

In the cold of the night following the battle, Jasper and Carnelian huddled around a leg of one of the injectors, watching the gemstone they’d placed on the ground in front of them. Carnelian tucked her knees up to her chin, and sighed. “How long do you think it’s gonna take her to reform?”

 

“I don’t know,” answered Jasper simply, leaning her head back against the cold metal of the injector. In the aftermath of battle, when the haze in her mind settled, when she no longer was running on pure instinct and coping mechanisms, she had nothing to shield herself from the reality she found herself in. She would become aware of not only her own mortality, but those of the Gems around her. She wanted to be stronger than that. She would never let anyone poof her. If she was taken down, how would the others protect themselves? 

 

Carnelian smiled sadly and reached over to tenderly pat Skinny’s gemstone. “It’s okay,” she said softly. “Take your time. We’ll be waiting for you.”


	9. Author's Note

Sorry guys, but due to lack of comments for the past couple chapters, I'm going back to infrequent updates. The chapters I uploaded were the relatively easy ones to edit (as easy as it can be adding almost 2000 words to each chapter), but going forward the chapters were going to be more and more difficult to edit - some of them basically having to be completely reworked - due to the changes made in canon since the time the original fic was written. I can only assume there isn't enough interest in the fic, which I have said is the biggest motivation for me to continue. And I just cannot justify the time it would take to edit them when I haven't received feedback.

I'll try to keep chiseling away at it, and will delete this author's note whenever I get around to the next chapter, but in the meantime I'll be focusing primarily on other things. Apologies to those who may have been genuinely interested. 


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